Ikaro » Online tools

Record Screencast Videos With Your Browser In A Click: ScreenToaster

admin — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 13:00:27 +0000

Screencast is a digital recording of screen output in real time used in presentations, brainstormings, tutorials and demos. Usually one have to install and use his own screencasting application to save the screen output into a video file wich have to be edited and published through videosharing sites.

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!

How To Surf The Internet Without Any Ads: foolDNS

admin — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 20:00:02 +0000

FoolDNS is an Italian startup that protect users from tracking operations performed by large advertising networks. In a few words, it removes banners, ads and any kind of advertising from websites that you visit.

From the official website:

FoolDNS is a private DNS service focusing on user’s privacy protection… Each time you access a webpage, or a banner appears, your navigation logs becomes visible to the website that you visit and to the advertising network that provide the ads on that page

That is true. Generally, both graphical and textual advertising are included through specific codes (javascript or else) that, besides viewing the ads, read your navigation log in order to recognize you when you visit different websites with the same ad network.

What you get by using FoolDNS

You’ll be able to surf the web just like before with two great advantages: you’ll see even censored websites and all ads on the pages will disappear.

What FoolDNS gets with this

A valuable db:

We can provide detailed information on the number of banners displayed by advertising networks to our users and, at the same time, we can extract precise data on the most searched websites from our DNS server. Everything is reinforced in an anonymous and aggregate way. In simple terms, it means we are aware of the website popularity as well as the several advertising networks popularity.

Doubts….

It sounds perfect, right? No publicity, no tracking and all for free. However, there’s something wrong with this…

The service perception concentrates on ethics and there’s something to say about this specific point of view. I’ll explain myself better:

It takes hours of work, lots of energy and effort to create relevant content to be provided to users not asking anything in return. Part of this effort is remunerated by online ads.

What FoolDNS does is not only removing advertising and detouring censorship, but also to intercept publicity on the blogger’s pages, memorizing data to be sold in the future and, then, make them disappear.

In few words, the blogger works to produce content and foolDNS takes advantage of it by creating a data file and statistics to be monetized.

That doesn’t sound very ethical. Should I call them bastards (to use their own words)? Of course not… : )

In what way would FoolDNS really be ethical?

There’s a little detail missing for foolDNS to be truly ethical and flawless: it is revenue sharing.

Does Adsense offer 75% of the clicks to sponsors? So, let foolDNS offer a fair payback out of data selling to the websites it gets ads from.

It’s not an immediate process, but it’s technically possible. I’d like to ask Matteo Flora some questions and I tried to reach him over the e-mail, but I haven’t had any answers from him yet.

This is the video of the FoolDNS speech (in italian) at Blogfest 2008 in Riva del Garda (IT) where I ask Matteo in the end if it`s possible to somehow give the user control of the online ads networks list to be cutted-of.

What do you think about it?

FeedBurner, Boost Your Content Distribution

admin — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 20:00:45 +0000

I tried, tested and used Feedburner, a free service to diffuse contents through feeds RSS (the most widespread) or of other kinds such as Podcast.

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

Insert you feed in FeedBurner
Feedburner uses your feed as a source and generates a new one with its own address (http://www.feedburner/feed_name)
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:

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

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

Feed Circulation shows the number of subscribers to your feed
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.
Item Stats blog statistics

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