Welcome Widgets

It's been a week of widgets here at international headquarters. And as usual they've come from all directions. You know we do a lot of transparent greeter video, humans, puppets - I'm considering my cat as well, but at her age she usually looks like a still image. One sure way to mobilize her is to start a green screen shooting session. You're guaranteed to have her wander into the frame and lie down. But I digress. A friend sent me a URL to another greeter example and it took me a few visits to realize that the site itself had something really cool on offer. Clicksaya offers to put a button on your web site, in your email signature, on your blog, to name a few options, which invites visitors or recipients to "call me". You sign up, provide a telephone number, pick a button, save the code, add it to, in my case a web site, and with the personal account, get sixty free minutes on calls among 27 countries at the moment - including Canada, the US and China. Like the candy bars at the grocery checkout, the idea is to provide an opportunity to act before the door closes behind you. I invited a friend traveling in Florida to try it out yesterday. He had some concerns about the graphics presented at his end but he entered his number, the call came through, the quality was acceptable and everything was fine until it dropped him in mid-sentence after about four minutes. It must have known that I was watching my free time going down the drain. To stay in service you may purchase minutes in blocks, at what seemed like reasonable cost to me, assuming you're increasing your contact with prospects.

The next wonder widget to cross my path came from AddThis, where again a bit of code adds a button to your web or blog content, and to your favourite browser if you like (good idea)and allows visitors to share with others your invaluable contributions to human development. You may also, by registering, access information as to the use visitors put to your button. If you have any widget stories to trade please leave a comment. Or call me - but talk fast.

Puppets Without Borders

It's not much of a picture but a little time and software turned the digital video it came from into a bit of web site magic. Puppeteer Mike Harding and I met last week for a second round of hand puppet segments on green screen. When that wrapped I sat down to create a message for visitors to the NetVideoMaker website, the result of which is available here.When you're a crew of one it can be tedious to be sure you're in the right spot, haven't cut off your head or feet and are properly lit. Having a field monitor is a great help and I had brought one to this shoot because Mike told me how helpful it would be for him to be able to see how his puppets were performing while he worked with them. We decided to give the monitor a bit part in one of the segments, the sample product from which you can view here.

This sample and the others I will link to below are demonstrations and as such they display over a still image rather than the actual website. It looks like you can use the links but you can't. Of course, in actual use this would not be the case. The other significant difference is illustrated in the first example, on the NetVideoMaker site. This is an actual implementation on a working website and when the video message completes one piece of code talks to another and whisks the image off stage so that if it had covered any live links they are available again. In the samples over a still image the video lingers on the final frame, something it would not do on a client site.

I will leave you with a couple more of the puppet samples, one or more of which will likely take up residence on Mike's site in the near future:
sample one
sample two
This last one isn't Mike's favourite but he deserves his moment on screen.
sample three