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Jing is free to download,  http://www.jingproject.com,  available for Mac and Windows computers, and (if you register to share your Jing screencasts) comes with a free account on Screencast.com. I was impressed to see that the free account did not expire in 60 days (as it would if you just went to Screencast.com and registered for a free account) but did not expire until 2015). The free account comes with 200MB of storage and 1GB of bandwidth, which seemed generous enough.

If users find they are using Jing to the degree it exceeds the monthly limits, offering up increases in account storage and bandwidth for a fee are necessary to offer this free to everyone.  Offers to upgrade my bandwidth, for a fee  - $21.95 for 100GB. If you choose not to pay, the screencast is just no longer available until the next month’s cycle starts.

I do not blame Techsmith for needing to fund the service, but this should be a caution for anyone hoping to use Jing as a completely free screencast option. If your screencast is large and/or even moderately well viewed, you are likely to need pay the price for the appropriate level of hosting. Do remember that Jing is in beta and Techsmith may well change the terms or provide other alternatives. At this point, if you want to use Jing, another option is to plan on hosting the screencast on your own Web site.

Unfortunately, the ease of using Jing to produce and share a screencast gets lost if you want to try this approach. It is still easy to record and save, but Jing just saves a single .swf Flash file. While you can just upload the .swf and point to it with a link, it gets more difficult to embed it on a page with a site’s navigation features, branding, commentary, and other content. One solution, which may not work in all browsers, was to build a page and then use the following code to embed the .swf:

<object classid=“clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000? width=“627? height=“391?>
  <param name=“movie” value=“FILENAME.swf”>
  <param name=“quality” value=“high”>
  <param name=“bgcolor” value=“#FFFFFF”>
  <embed src=“FILENAME.swf” quality=“high” bgcolor=“#FFFFFF”

width=“627? height=“391? type=“application/x-shockwave-flash”></embed></object>

Note that the width and height elements need to be set in two places, and you need to know what those dimensions are.  You can see this backup version hosted on this site, but producing a page like this took much more time than using Camtasia Studio, Captive, Wink, or other screencasting software that produces both an .swf and the HTML page container.

Screencast.com is the ideal hosting solution for Jing because it’s designed specifically for high-fidelity screen content and won’t distort your media when being viewed. That being said, we also have learned that sharing has a broader definition. We have started work on extending our sharing options outside of just Screencast.com. With those additional sharing options, you’ll be able to get the URL or embed code returned as well - making everything you described above dead simple to do with Jing.

How To Use Jing:

“Think of Jing as a supplement to all your chat discussions, email threads, forum posts and blog entries. It sits nicely on your desktop, ready to capture and share your stuff at a moment’s notice. Simply select an area of your screen, capture it as an image or record it as a video, and then click Share. Jing conveniently places a URL to your content on your clipboard ready for you to paste the URL into any of your conversations.”

“Your content is hosted on Screencast.com, for which we are providing a complimentary account to all participants during this project. Users have 200MB of space for storing screenshots and screencasts and 1 GB of bandwidth that renews monthly. The Screencast.com account will remain available to you for the duration of the project.”
Screencast.com? What is that?

Screencast.com is a web hosting service from TechSmith Corporation. It’s a premier hosting service specifically made for screen video content. It does not change or diminish the resolution of your content. It provides detailed permissions that you can administer so you control who can access your media and you retain ownership of the media you upload. Screencast.com serves as the web hosting backend to the Jing Project, enabling TechSmith to provide you with instant hosting and sharing of your content.
Who can participate?

Anyone may use Jing.

And It’s free for now!

Here’s the deal; Jing isn’t a product right now—it’s a project to figure out whether it fills a need or provides a useful service. They're asking for both your participation and feedback on this concept. As they learn what you want from this, they’ll have a better idea what the pricing and business model might look like in the future.

Uses of Jing

Jing on Flickr
Jing on Skype
Jing for Tech Support and Forums
Jing and Product Demos

I think many schools would have a good use of Jing to write instructions, explanations and tutorials.  Many students might be able to use Jing to enhance their reports.

Here's the link to Jing again:  http://www.jingproject.com

Angela Wickenberg

Written by Emre Sokullu and edited by Richard MacManus

There are now so many companies vying to be the next YouTube, it's easy to lose track of them all. So let's take a look at the entire online video industry and categorize the major players. Our thanks to Ali Dagli of Savvian, for providing us a lot of the useful data listed here. 

In this post we've summarized the latest video industry innovations under the following categories:

• Video Sharing
• Intermediaries
• Video Search
• Video eCommerce
• Video Editing & Creation
• Rich Media Advertising
• P2P (Peer To Peer)
• Video Streaming
• Vlogosphere

In that spirit, Business 2.0 magazine sent senior writer Paul Kaihla and a team of reporters on a quest to find some of the best "best practices" in business today. The companies they interviewed have stumbled upon their own unique methods for doing everything from running meetings and generating product ideas to troubleshooting M&A deals and keeping board directors on their toes.

Following are 25 ideas that are truly gems, broken down into five categories: finance, HR, management, marketing, and R&D.

They're methods that help keep some of the best-run companies, like Procter & Gamble (Research), Google (Research), Southwest Airlines (Research), Microsoft (Research), Intel (Research), and Coke (Research), at the top of their game. You've probably never heard of most of these practices — but you might want to start implementing them tomorrow. 

HEWLETT-PACKARD CEO Mark Hurd loves numbers–and insists that his managers learn to love them too. Since Hurd came onboard last March, one of the key tools he's used to keep pace with rivals is his extreme form of industry benchmarking. Instead of comparing HP's sales and profits with Dell's or IBM's, the company now tracks itself against rivals by every conceivable measure. "We want to make sure we break down every unit and business function," explains Marius Haas, senior strategy officer at HP, "so we can become best in class in each one."

Here's how it works: Imagine a matrix with various business units running down the side (printing, servers, storage, IT services, etc.) and business functions across the top (finance, HR, marketing, R&D, etc.). Now create benchmarks for each of the 72 resulting cells and you have a good idea of how Hurd is managing the $87 billion company. The benchmarks are the best guess of where HP's rivals are going to be in 2007, based on more than a dozen variables, from real estate cost per square foot to operating expenses as a percentage of gross margin.

Before Hurd took over, HP measured itself primarily against IBM, using one very blunt tool: costs as a percentage of revenues. That ignored IBM's higher gross margins and the fact that it has more gross profit to spread around. Hurd's new benchmarking method formed the basis of HP's reorganization effort announced last July, through which HP has promised to save $3 billion by 2008. Already there is key evidence of success: Operating expenses as a percentage of gross margin dropped 2 percent in 2005, helping to fatten profits by $385 million. — E.S.

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StomperNet is giving away some software.  It's called Scrutinizer.

The purpose of the software is is to show what the human eye sees when a person visits your site.

I looked at my website with the scrutinizer and I think I need a course to learn how to use it - or to give it to my designer or some other expert.  I couldn't figure out a thing when I was looking at that  blurred version of my site.

But according to StomperNet, here are the top 10 uses of this software.

1. Simulate eye tracking in a usability task
Usability testing, where you ask a person to accomplish something on your website, is a very valuable technique. It's challenging however to understand what the user is thinking as they work. Many usability tests are conducted using a "think aloud" technique where you ask the user to say what they're thinking and doing as they do it.

In the StomperNet Usability Lab, where they have a Tobii eye-tracker, they say that the real time eye tracking gaze data is extremely helpful for inferring what the user is thinking. It reduced the need for the user to talk aloud. You can use the Scrutinizer to simulate the eye tracker, keeping you in synch with what the user is seeing.

2. Assess the ease of use of multi-step processes

Transactions, e-commerce, informational, or configuration, are some of the most critical aspects of your site for achieving business objectives. Using the Scrutinizer simulator, you can assess the visual grouping of the interface elements necessary to move through the sequence. If successive steps are not within the foveal view, does your design make the user action required to find the next step easy?

 Here is a link to where the download is http://stomperblog.com/2007/12/27/have-you-downloaded-stomper-scrutinizer-yet/ where they also have three excellent videos that will help improve rankings and traffic.

Angela Wickenberg

I hadn't thought to tell anybody - I was really rather ashamed that I keep falling for hyped up claims and insincere web copy, but certain circumstances in my life at this time merit it being brought out into the open without smearing anyone's name.

I recently hopped onto the co-registration band-wagon and purchased leads from a source that was recommended by someone I trusted and respected.   Only minutes after I paid the thousand dollar fee, for a three part payment, totalling $3,000, I received a new email by the trusted marketer, apologizing for the previous recommendation and describing the vendor as a crook and hustler.  I was dreadfully frightened, but I immediately wrote to the vendor through paypal and told him I wanted a refund because he was suspected of embezzelment.  I received a prompt refund.  I have since read in other places a description of the many things this man has done, reportedly even fooling and cheating several major league marketers.

In a book called "Influence", Robert Cialdini, a social psychologist, who over the course of a fairly short but incredibly dense book, lays out all the ways that we, humans, can be manipulated. His stated reason for this is so "you" the reader can better defend "yourself" against the constant barrage of tricksters and hucksters.

And if that's not all, it happens to also be a blueprint for anyone who DOES want to use these natural human traits against others. No matter how you cut it, this is an important book to read to help you see through the veil of shameless trickery that abounds, in our industry and in our world.

Here is an excerpt from the wikipedia entry on him:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Cialdini

Six "weapons of influence"

Cialdini defines six "weapons of influence":

* Reciprocation - People tend to return a favor. Thus, the pervasiveness of free samples in marketing. In his conferences, he often uses the example of Ethiopia providing thousands of dollars in humanitarian aid to Mexico just after the 1985 earthquake, in return to past gestures (more than 40 years before!!!) Mexico had with Ethiopia.

* Commitment and Consistency - If people agree to make a commitment toward a goal or idea, they are more likely to honor that commitment. However, if the incentive or motivation is removed after they have already agreed, they will continue to honor the agreement. For example, in car sales, suddenly raising the price at the last moment works because the buyer has already decided to buy. See cognitive dissonance.

* Social Proof - People will do things that they see other people are doing. For example, in one experiment, one or more accomplices would look up into the sky; the more accomplices the more likely people would look up into the sky to see what they were seeing. At one point this experiment aborted, as so many people were looking up, that they stopped traffic. See conformity, and the Asch conformity experiments.

* Authority - People will tend to obey authority figures, even if they are asked to perform objectionable acts. Cialdini cites incidents, such as the Milgram experiments in the early 1960s and the My Lai massacre.

* Liking - People are easily persuaded by other people that they like. Cialdini cites the marketing of Tupperware in what might now be called viral marketing. People were more likely to buy if they liked the person selling it to them. Some of the many biases favoring more attractive people are discussed. See physical attractiveness stereotype.

* Scarcity - Perceived scarcity will generate demand. For example, saying offers are available for a "limited time only" encourages sales.

In his book most of Cialdini's examples start with a story about how he got taken in by this specific method of influence.

One that comes to mind is how he got caught up in the mad post-Christmas rush to buy a toy for his kid, that he had promised to get his kid FOR Christmas, but the stores were drastically undersold.

When he told his friend his woes, his friend clued him in that the toy companies over promote certain toys to the kids, to get the parents to promise the toy, and then they undersupply, so the parents have to buy something else FOR Christmas, and then still make good on their original promise AFTER Christmas, because, well, we honor our commitments.