cogdog's posterous

As social media continues to gain acceptance as a bona-fide communications platform, I thought it might be fun to have a cool fact about it for every week of the year.

So, here are ten facts about the five most well-known social media outlets – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and blogging – with two more bonus facts thrown in just for fun. (And to get to the figure of a fact a week for a year).

Useful set of facts about Facebook, twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, blogging

One of the first things I thought to use my iPad for was presenting and live demos.  After all, it’s such a sleek, elegant device, why on Earth would I want to lug my laptop around at all?  So I started researching ways to present from it.

First choice seemed to be obvious:  Use Keynote. There are a few problems though.  I’m not going to get into it, as it has been well documented in other places, but suffice to say there were enough issues that I decided it wasn’t the right solution to me.  Amongst other things, I didn’t want to have to convert 5 years worth of presentations over.

So I looked into ways to do Powerpoint directly from the iPad.  There’s been several articles on this as well, and so far I haven’t been thrilled with any of them.  Converting them all to images seemed a hassle, and wouldn’t support any of the ‘mouse click’ animations I use when navigating through slides (having things appear and disappear within a single slide with each mouse click, most often to highlight things).  Converting the presentation to video wasn’t even an option as my timing varies greatly based on the audience.  Most of the PPT viewers I tried only did an adequate job of displaying them. Often there were formatting errors, and none of them would support animations or videos.

Which leads me to the method that finally worked well enough that I decided to give it a whirl…  in front of a live audience… in an overflowing room…  full of administrators and tech coordinators… at ISTE.

Steve Dembo describes his successful solution of using GoodReader on the iPad.
http://www.teach42.com/2010/07/07/ipad-presenting-powerpoint-videos-web-demos...

Hockney first became interested in iPhones about a year ago (he grabbed the one I happened to be using right out of my hands). He acquired one of his own and began using it as a high-powered reference tool, searching out paintings on the Web and cropping appropriate details as part of the occasional polemics or appreciations with which he is wont to shower his friends.

But soon he discovered one of those newfangled iPhone applications, entitled Brushes, which allows the user digitally to smear, or draw, or fingerpaint (it's not yet entirely clear what the proper verb should be for this novel activity), to create highly sophisticated full-color images directly on the device's screen, and then to archive or send them out by e-mail. Essentially, the Brushes application gives the user a full color-wheel spectrum, from which he can choose a specific color. He can then modify that color's hue along a range of darker to lighter, and go on to fill in the entire backdrop of the screen in that color, or else fashion subsequent brushstrokes, variously narrower or thicker, and more or less transparent, according to need, by dragging his finger across the screen, progressively layering the emerging image with as many such daubings as he desires.^[2]

Over the past six months, Hockney has fashioned literally hundreds, probably over a thousand, such images, often sending out four or five a day to a group of about a dozen friends, and not really caring what happens to them after that. (He assumes the friends pass them along through the digital ether.) These are, mind you, not second-generation digital copies of images that exist in some other medium: their digital expression constitutes the sole (albeit multiple) original of the image.

Direct Link to story
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23176#