With  ScreenToaster everything becomes more simple and available for everyone:

• Connect to the ScreenToaster home page
• Click on the Start Recording button
• Press ALT+S to start recording the screen output
  
• Then, press ALT+S again to stop recording

After visualizing the video draft you can add comments in audio using the microphone or subtitles, and save the screencast in the users’ area by clicking on Publish it. The embedding code to insert the video on your blog will be available. It’s almost immediate.

This way you avoid installing softwares on your PC, generating huge typical screencast session files, editing them and uploading them online.

Quality is what surprises most. In this kind of filming, quality is really essential for the users to visualize important details such as the cursor, the text, the interface elements like the buttons, menu, etc. ScreenToaster, besides making it more simple, guarantees remarkable quality.

Here’s a screencast developed at the time this article was being written, check it out:

This is a project by Iteria SARL, a French start-up capable of this huge step after getting financing from an angel investor in September/08. It had financed the prototype itself before that.

ScreenToaster, a great service!

Photo Credit: solarseven

I opened a proper thread into the Problogger forum and  others bloggers provided quickly relevant and useful information, as usual.

Skinny said:

I don’t use a plugin- just got a MailChimp account (or use whatever email marketing provider you want) to set up my database and then have the html opt-in form linked on my site- they enter information there and it dumps to my email marketing account with MailChimp.

MailChimp seems a good mailing list manager, and it’s free up to 500 subscriptios as Sid said;

With MailChimp you can have up to 500 subs for free. I am using MailChimp, you can sign up for the free motivational quotes ebook in my sig if you want to check out how the sign up works for a free bonus with a subscription. I customized it a *lot* so that all the thankyou pages etc are on my site – I think it is pretty spiffy =)

It integrates with WordPress, Twitter and others platform . The WP plugin adds  a subscription form in the sidebar and store the information directly into the MailChimp db.

Chickblogger instead was using Aweber, another well known email marketing software but he’s giving up because he find it a little bit expansive;

… I too await some answers. I had Aweber for a while and ratched up some 500 subscribers but had to cancel as the price went up from $19 a month to $29 a month, and I honestly didn’t know what I was doing…

Rhys has a different approach:

The problem is with a dedicated mailing list “Plugin” is that you’d probably get thrown off your server for spamming, so you’re far better using something like Aweber/Mailchimp (my choice). I have written a plugin called WP Email Capture which can be used to display a form on your site, which mimics the functionality of all those Aweber boxes out there (Mailchimp’s sign up form in my opinion isn’t particularly good), which you can then export to other programs

I will say this, if you import into Aweber & some other programs, you have to reconfirm again, however I’ve never had a problem with Mailchimp, and it has a high success rate of delivery.

It’s a nice solution because it let you manage directly email collection, but on the other hand it requires to transfer the  list from the WP db to the mailing list software each time that you need to mail your users.

Syed, the author of WPBeginner, propose to connect WordPress directly to feedburnew with some tricks;

Because of high demand, I got this tutorial written…

You can use WordPress and Feedburner with a few plugins to make your WordPress work as a Newsletter Manager type service that Aweber has.

You guys might want to check it out  – Create a Free Email Newsletter Service using WordPress

Another relevat resource is  A Trek Through WordPress Mailing List Plugins – Email Mailing List Manager by Solomon Rothman, who describe 8  mailing list plugin for wordpress.

I still don’t know what solution suite my needs but i’ll continue to dig around a bit…

Thanks to alll of you for sharing

The version 2.0 has been recently launched and it allows the bulk-editing for key-words relative to several active campaigns on AdWords and friendly systems. In few words, it allows you to research, change and manage all passwords relative to the campaigns from several advertising platforms.

It supports visitors’ tracking and management of new banners formats on Google. It also brings a simple and intuitive interface.

More than just for final users, it’s a great tool for advertising agencies and online advertising which generally run several ads campaigns on different networks. Clickable pro 2.0 offers a 15-day trial period and has two subscription plans: US$129/month or 5% of campaigns investiment for an investiment higher than US$2,500.

Some communities focus on a very specific genre, while all kinds of videos can be found in others. Check out the best video sharing sites for video broadcasting and viral marketing:

YouTube – It’s the most popular of all. New online streaming portals may contain some other functionality, but when it comes to traffic stats, YouTube is still number one.

Current – Interactive media where you can share and vote on videos, texts and photos. The best voted videos are broadcasted on TV.

Yahoo! Video – A Youtube competitor with no special features, but fair traffic.

Metacafe – A great choice in curiosity and fun videos broadcasting. Frequently used for viral marketing in other countries.

Google Video – Easy to use.

Revver – High quality streaming, slightly slow for video broadcasting.

Dailymotion – Alice’s video portal. Easy to use, indicated for viral broadcasting due to its functionalities.

Veoh – The successor to Stage6. Find a wide range of TV series and programs in streaming, besides users’ videos.

Sclipo – Self promotion, indicated to professional use. It’s a kind of LinkedIn video (or it aspires to).

Viddler – Ads profits are shared with publishers, but each video is manually checked under strict criteria of validation. Images on a connected TV can target a video refusal due to copyright issues.

Vimeo – Fine HD quality and definition, easy to use.

Graspr - Tutorials on just about… anything (how-to videos).

5min – Another video portal for micro courses of all kinds and demands.

Howcast - How to do…

StupidVideos.com – The name explains it all. Great gags for workmates.

Imeem – Plus music and photo, ideal for artists.

Break – Live recorded accidents and curious situations. Real online TV like.

Bolt – Lifecasting, life sharing. A must among teenagers.

ClipShack – Streaming geotagging and sharing.

Eyespot – Video sharing and remixing.

Jumpcut – The best choice in online video-editing and remix.

I started testing it on a couple of web sites after obtaining an invitation as beta-tester from antirez (AKA Salvatore Sanfilippo, cofounder of Merzia together with Fabio Pitrola).

There is an essential difference between a normal web analytics program (like GAnalytics, for example) and LLOOGG: it allows you to track in real time accesses and navigation of the users on your web site and provide a lot of useful information like:

• Visitor origin
• Keywords
• Originating country
• Graphic resolution of the client
• Browser and OS
• navigation path

Nevertheless, it doesn’t finish here. These data are already present (more or less explicitly) into the logs of every web server. These are the winning points of LLOOGG:

• It is a different, but complementary, service respect the traditional web analytics that uses log files to generate stats
• It provides information in real time using an Ajax web interface. A browser is all you need.
• It improves and makes more readable the data already present into the httpd logs
• It let you to correlate between the each log related to a single user thanks to a colored marked

It’s sufficient to insert a JavaScript code, which will detect the user’s visit into each content page that you want to track and the visitor information will start to fall into the web Ajax interface. It’s seems a kind of Matrix effect. Look:

As you can this visitor landed on this page searching for “voipstunt” via Google.co.uk and it come from United Kingdom. There is also his monitor resolution and browser type/version. This information block will fall down from top each time a user accesses a page. Look on the grey marker: every user is marked by a colour, which allows you to identify it in the long list of accesses in order to follow his navigation.

This user is reading several pages:

Reading from top to the bottom:

1. he entered directly into the VoIPStunt article page
2. he clicked to the VoIP category link
3. he read the Gizmo Project article
4. he went back to the VoIP category page
5. he is now reading the guide about mobile VoIP installation.

Even if geeks will enjoy the idea of a web analytics in a Matrix style, imho LLOOGG strongest point is about web marketing: in fact it allows to monitor the efficiency on the immediate of social news and social networking that web usually use to spread our contents.

In this way I discovered that also the rejected news posted on Slashdot could produce an interesting traffic amount thanks to the approval tail any way available for logged users.

Log blocks obviously will populate an historical DB, which will be used to generate chart and stats. It’s still not clear exactly what kind of features will be available for the PRO account and what will be available for the free one. Anyway, this is the list of features currently available for beta testers:

• Maximum number of logs shown in the Ajax interface (LIFO list)
• Pause/restart monitoring buttons
• Top Referrers
• Top Searches
• Monthly/daily/hourly charts and stats
• Browser Stats

LLOOGG is currently available only on invitation. If you want an invitation just leave your email using the comment form.

Actually I was positively impressed by the automation level Feedburner offers with regard to operations usually made by hand such as signaling updates to pinging services, tools to subscribe to feeds with different kinds of aggregators through the web site, feed circulation monitoring and much more.

The only drawback (if I may say so) is the great number of options and features which might make the tool distractive to non–experts. I will highlight the main features as clearly as possible, granted that, in order to use Feedburner, it is necessary to have one’s own contents at disposal in a RSS feed. Here follows the scheme to integrate Feedburner with your feed

1. Insert you feed in FeedBurner
2. Feedburner uses your feed as a source and generates a new one with its own address (http://www.feedburner/feed_name)
3. All the operations are executed on the generated feed, which will be the new official feed (yours stands as data source). Once it has absorbed your feed to generate its own, you can work on it with the powerful tools at disposal.

Feedburner automates following procedures:

• Subscriptions to the feed via web with various aggregators
• Content updates signaling to pinging services
• Technical compliance of feed to the greatest possible number of aggregators
• Monitoring of bot controls to the feed (engines check to verify any upgrade)

Subscription

Subscription to the service is easy and immediate. You just need to insert the first feed in addition to username, password and e-mail address in order to be operative. In the following form, you’ll find the main interface containing all the features grouped under five labels:
A. Analyze | monitoring on contents diffusion
B. Optimize | various technical settings of your feed
C. Publicize | feed diffusion automation through various tools
D. Monetize | feed integration with AdSense for Feed and Amazon
E. Troubleshootize | support Let’s examine the different tools in utilization order, namely, after inserting the feed, let us follow these steps;

Optimize

The items ‘Your feed’ and ‘XML source’ are used to personalize the source code which generates your feed’s page on Feedburner, whose URL is http://www.feedburner/. Then we find:

1. BrowserFriendly sets graphical themes of the page and custom information as title and description.
2. SmartCast automatically generates a feed podcast, compliant with iTunes
3. SmartFeed transforms your feed in a format compliant with most widespread aggregators
4. FeedFlare integrates in each post a few tools users can interact with, such as Technorati, del.icio.us and other ones.
5. Link Splicer should you have a service for social book-marking, you can insert your links in the feed
6. Photo Splicer the same for pictures
7. Geotag Your Feed input latitude and longitude and you’ll have your feed associated to a point in the globe.
8. Feed Image Burner sets an icon for feeds which is then displayed in various RSS readers.
9. Convert Format Burner here you set your feed page content-type. As default it is the same of your source feed
10. Summary Burner You can also customize your Feedburner page with links to your site

Once set the main options, we can go on to the setting of automatic feed distribution through publicize tab.

Publicize

1. BuzzBoost generates an html code showing last feed posts which can be inserted in any web page
2. Headline Animator same purpose but with a tiny animated graphical block. Headlines are displayed scrolling
3. PingShot setting of automatic notice to RSS web aggregators (technorati, myYahoo, etc) with regard to new contents on your feed
4. Email Subscriptions generates an e-mail notice system to your site users in case of new contents
5. FeedCount small graphical counter displaying your feed’s spread on the net
6. Awareness API gives access to Feedburner data for custom applications in your site
7. Chicklet Chooser generates the code necessary to let users subscribe to the feed directly on your site, and with lots of aggregators.
8. Password Protector should you need to restrict access to your feed
9. Creative Commons includes Creative Commons licenses for your feed

After setting diffusion parameters, you can include in your system affiliation programs

Monetize

Amazon or Adsense too can be included in your site. In order to include Amazon, you just need to input the affiliation code, while for Adsense a brand new system in beta test called “Adsense for Feed “is available. If the readers of your feed are more than 100, you can subscribe as beta tester. The system goes to it on its own, and it is sufficient consulting statistics from time to time to check feed diffusion and make adjustments when needed.

Analyze

1. Feed Circulation shows the number of subscribers to your feed
2. Readership monitoring on web aggregators which took from your feed, subscriptions via web, aggregator type, any subscription made through browser, what engines have checked for updates, etc.
3. Item Stats blog statistics

Feedburner address: http://www.feedburner.com

Compared  to Mogulus TV, USTream and Yahoo! Live, CSLive is defined by its ease of use. Free from Mogulus complex functionalities and from USTream shows management, it could become an ideal tool for those who want to approach live streaming on internet not having to go through more complex video broadcast configuration.

CSLive Functionalities

The best CSLive feature is that it allows the beginning of an online streaming almost instantaneously while you chat with your viewers. All you need is a webcam online and a mic.

Main functionalities:

• you can set the quality of video broadcast on-the-fly
• embedded  ascii chat
• adjustable audio level
• external video player for your blog (or others web pages)
• you can broadcast private shows locking your streaming with a password

Here’s the control panel:

And the control toolbar below the video panel:

After your subscription you have to login into your control panel and click on Publish button to start an audio/video streaming. You can also set a  name and a category for your channel which will be listed on the home page.

Streaming quality

Quality depends by your internet connection bandwidth. I’ve performed a test on a 10Mbps ADSL in Downstream and 256kbps in Upstream. Here’s the outflow during the test:

In order to let a friend of mine (connected from home with a 7Mbps DSL) watch a fluid video streaming  with a 7Mbps ADSL, I had to configurate the video quality rate on my video panel at 50%.

Finally, it’s a good service that focuses on simplicity and it might come up as a great solution for those who don’t have the need for complex functionalities or an advanced managing of script programs.

I realize that many users have some trouble in order to get simple reports such as search engine keyword list, or most viewed web pages with Google Analytics. Some example;

• Referring web sites
• Referring pages
• Search engine hits
• Most popular keywords

and so on. This is a micro-guide to Analytics for essential usage with some little hints and tips.

How to get a referring web sites list

Check the left menu and select:

Marketing Optimization > Visitor Segment Performance > Referring Source

You’ll see a list of  referring sites on the right side of the screen grouped by domain of the current week   (ou can change it,l et’s see it later ) . Take care, search engines will be shown here among others referring sites.

Specific referring URLs

Click on the red bullet close to the domain name in order to show more informations about the source domain, like the specific URL and others useful informations.

Search Engine Hits

Many users are not able to find their most popular keywords inside Analytics. Here it is;

Marketing Optimization > Search Engine Marketing > CPC vs Organic Conversion

That’s it. We get a list of  the search engine hits grouped by domain. You can also draw a trend chart related to each engine; just click on the red bullet to open a submenu an click on: Data Over Time. Take a look on others items; there a lot of interesting reports.

Popular Keywords

Now let’s see the keywords of a single engine: click on the [+] engine bullet and that’s it!. Also in this case you can draw  a trend chart for each keyword clickin on the red bullet close to it, in the same way you did for search engines domains.

Hints and tricks

You can change the time range of each list/chart shown on screen in this way;

1. Click on the yellow icon on the top right of the calendar table
2. Select the start date on the left
3. Select the end date on the right
4. Click on “Apply range>>” below

Another useful feature of Analytics is the daily trend which can be really useful to discover the best hour to publish new content on your website. It’s enough to click on a single day into the calendar panel in order to display the traffic trend on hourly basis.

So, it’s not exactly the Analytics Bible, but it’s enough to start. Now it’s up to you.
Google Analytics is a free service. Register here.