Byte of the Week

Earlier this week someone asked me which was better Flickr or Picasa, both are online photo sharing tools. I have used both – but I must admit that I found some articles from other experts rather than do extensive research myself. (After all I’m a librarian, not a tester!)

I found a couple of articles that lay out the differences:

http://www.priteshgupta.com/2009/05/flickr-picasa-web-albums/ – a great article – but it doesn’t give an opinion per se

http://www.stealblade.com/2010/01/facebook-photos-vs-flickr-vs-picasa-vs.html – they lean towards Picasa, but give some good reasons and mention other tools

http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/12/picasa-web-albums-vs-flickr-which.html – they lean towards Flickr

It seems as if Flickr may be best if you want to build a community – for example invite others to add their image to your collection. Picasa is better if you think folks might want to download the images for any reason. The second article mentioned Facebook – which might be worth considering if your main goal is reaching people and you already dabble in Facebook at all.

OK a couple of weeks ago I mentioned QR codes with a promise to say more later – well it’s later. It’s a little later than intended but I got mixed up with a great vacation in the West of Ireland and a week back home for work. (For a great refresher or demonstration of QR code you should check out this link from my friend John in St Paul: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsPRpQfHYOY).

Google Local Business Center has changed and is now Google Places. You know when you search for something and you get the almost phone book like listings at the top – well that’s Google Places. And if you have a business web site – especially if location matters – it makes sense to claim your address (real and URL) on Google Places. According to the Google blog here are some of the new features of Google Places (although first I’ll add that one of the best features is that most features are still free):

• Service areas: If you travel to serve customers, you can now show which geographic areas you serve. And if you run a business without a storefront or office location, you can now make your address private.
• A new, simple way to advertise: For just $25 per month, businesses in select cities can make their listings stand out on Google.com and Google Maps with Tags. As of today, we’re rolling out Tags to three new cities — Austin, Atlanta and Washington, D.C. — in addition to ongoing availability in Houston and San Jose, CA. In the coming weeks we’ll also be introducing Tags in Chicago, San Diego, Seattle, Boulder and San Francisco.
• Business photo shoots: In addition to uploading their own photos, businesses in select cities can now request a free photo shoot of the interior of their business which we’ll use to supplement existing photos of businesses on Place Pages. We’ve been experimenting with this over the past few months, and now have created a site for businesses to learn more and express their interest in participating.
• Customized QR codes: From the dashboard page of Google Places, businesses in the U.S. can download a QR code that’s unique to their business, directly from their dashboard page. QR codes can be placed on business cards or other marketing materials, and customers can scan them with certain smartphones to be taken directly to the mobile version of the Place Page for that business.
• Favorite Places: We’re doing a second round of our Favorite Places program, and are mailing window decals to 50,000 businesses around the U.S. These decals include a QR code that can be scanned with a smartphone to directly view the mobile Place Page for the business to learn more about their great offerings.

You can take advantage of as much or as little as you want – but as I said it make sense to at least claim your spot. You can do so here: http://google.com/places

I ran across these sites today when I was thinking about pictures to use in a blog post. They are databases of free images; there are some restrictions of use – such as no “adult” usage, re-selling or using photos of people to endorse products – but for general use, even commercial use it’s OK to use these pictures:

Stock.Xchng: http://www.sxc.hu
Flickr Creative Commons pictures: http://www.flickr.com/search/advanced/?

With Flickr, you have to make sure to search for Creative Commons images, which means you can use them – but there are thousands available. You’ll just want to check to see if there’s an Attribution clause on the photo, which simply simple you should give credit to the photographer.

I think I’ve talked about this amazing tool before but it just came up for me again. The Wayback Machine (http://www.archive.org) keeps older versions of web sites. They don’t keep every web site, but they keep a lot. Also their funding seems precarious so some years they archive more than others. So say you want to find a web site that’s now defunct, visit the Wayback Machine, put in the address and cross your fingers. This works best for older, more popular sites.

If that doesn’t work, you can always try Google’s cache. Do a keyword search for the site in question. If Google has a record of it, it will come up. If the site is gone, clicking on it will not help – but you could try the Cached button found on the search results page, usually under the site description. This works best for newer (or more recently deceased) sites.

You know those links that help you share your web site with someone easily through Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites? AddThis (http://www.addthis.com) is a tool that mak es it very easy to post that link on your site or hosted blog. (By hosted blog, I mean one that is not hosted at WordPress.com).

I won’t get into the setup because it depends on where you want to add it (a web site, Blogger, WordPress…) and they give excellent instructions. I tried it on WordPress and Blogger without any hassles.

Google now hosts template-based sites: https://sites.google.com/site/sites/ I set one up: https://sites.google.com/site/pelicancruises/

The good news:
• the site looks very OK
• it only took about an hour for me to setup
• I feel like it could look good with another hour or so work
• I could point a domain name to it
• I suspect it ought to do well with Google

There are definitely some things I don’t love about the site. I’d like to be able to make more changes to the templates. I think it’s easy to plug in Picasa pictures and slideshows.

So while I don’t think you’ll find Fortune 400 businesses moving to this anytime soon, I think this is a great starter web site.

Jay in Minneapolis asked me about affordable and/or free online chat options, such as Private Chat from the Online Institute (http://www.onlineinstitute.com/chat/). Private Chat allows you to chat with one or more people (text chat) as well as post documents, including video in a shared space. The cost is a $10 setup fee and $10 per month. One of the nice things is that Private Chat is that it doesn’t require a software download.

So I have to admit that I wasn’t able to look personally into a lot of options, but I was able to check out ThinkofIt http://thinkofit.com/webconf/index.htm, a (Minnesota-based) guide to web conferencing and online chat tools. They mention Online Institute – and several others.

Sorry Jay that’s the best I can do but ThinkofIt lists several similar tools (http://thinkofit.com/webconf/hostsites.htm#cheapbbs) with good, concise descriptions and some of the tools are free.

I hope that helps!

So you have a web site and you want your potential customers to find you on Google. The problem is you have a couple of clients who keep beating you out of the top places. Well the first step to beating them is finding out more about them. You can find out a ton with Keyword Spy: http://www.keywordspy.com

Keyword spy will tell you if your client buys any PPC (pay per click) ads. It will tell you what keyword phrases it finds when it scans the site, how often those terms are search and how much they would cost if you were to bid on PPC ads. It will also give you a list of the main competitors it finds.

Or you could type in a few keywords and it will start by telling you which sites do well with those terms, how often they are search, the bid amounts and from there you can get to the competitors’ site and get more info.

It will give you a good idea about what terms you should add to your site and how much you might have to spent on PPC ads if you wanted to buy your way to the top of the list.

The best part – you can access a lot of Keyword Spy with a free membership.

I found a new way to share vacation pictures – Animoto (www.animoto.com). You can sign up for free – the directions on the site are specific and easy to follow. You simply upload your photos, choose background music and add details.

For free you can upload 8-15 images. I uploaded the images without resizing from my camera – just to see if it would work and it did. You could upload your own music (if you have the copyright!). The slideshow ends up being about 30 second.

Once created it’s easy to post a link to your video on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. Also it’s easy to grab the code for the video to embed it into your site.

If you want something longer, you can upgrade to a paid account.

If you didn’t have vacation pictures you could use this for a tour of a house for sale, a resort, a campus, your products…

I had vacation pics for my test: http://tinyurl.com/m4mmjz

Today I spoke to MAP’s Nonprofit Tech Talk group about web sites. The idea was really a checklist of items to look for on your web site – especially if you are considering or making changes to your site.

Here’s the presentation and the actual checklist; it includes a lot of my favorite free tools.