Traveling Down the Information Backroad

There are quite a few book publishing sites on the web, but Blurb is my favorite. First, great quality. Second, real color dust covers, rather then the cutout square covers most other companies sell. Third, very reasonable pricing.

For this past Christmas I put together a book of old Family photographs that none of the family had seen in at least 25 years. These old photos all had to be scanned and then adjusted in Photoshop. The result was a big hit with the family and my sister even took her copy to work to show, and she said everyone was really impressed. i’m now working on a book of photographs I’ve taken in Huntington the past five years, and this fall I will start on a volume 2 of family photos. Photobooks, cookbooks and even alternative school yearbooks have been produced through Blurb.

In addition, Blurb also has some cool Web 2.0 features that I haven’t seen with other book sites.

First you can have Blurb get your Photos from Flickr and automatically place them within a template in the free Blurb BookSmart software. Even cooler, Blurb can also grab your blog from such sites as wordpress.com and others and automatically make a book for you. Right now, Blurb doesn’t let me add this self-hosted blog, but I expect that feature will arrive at some point.

Check out their site where you can preview books and download their free software:

http://www.blurb.com

Below is a thumbnail of the cover for my family photo book:

[tag]blurb[/tag]

Veotag is an interesting video sharing site where you can ‘tag’ sections of your video. These tags appear along with your video, and users can jump to any portion of a presentation by clicking one of the tags. Whar’s even nicer is that the tags are searchable in the major search engines and when you click a search result it will not only take you to your veotag presentation, it will also jump to the veotag you searched for and begin playing from that point.

Pullman Square – July 2006

Originally uploaded by Doug Quaid.
This is the picture with attached notes as referenced in my interview on Ed Tech Chatter. Click the picture to go to the Flickr page.

The map below appears courtesy of the GeoPress plugin. I can see this being used to let your blog viewers track the progress of a trip you are taking.

INSERT_MAP

Jott.com offers an interesting service. Suppose I’m in my car doing my long commute to SCOCA, and I have an idea, or I need to remind myself of something. All I need to do is call the Jott number, and I can leave a message up to 15 seconds long. The message is converted to text and sent to my email address, or I can call Jott to listen to it.

A very useful service.

A really funny video from Alvin Trusty

 [youtube]oT9XoJLDNjE[/youtube]

From Alvin’s Educational Technology Blog

I need to get thie blog going again, and I intend to post everyday.