I can count on one hand the number of Webex or Gotomeeting web meetings I’ve been to that went without a hitch. It is to be expected that at least one of the participants isn’t properly configured or there is some other kind of technical problem. And the services aren’t cheap: both running you a minimum of around $500 per year.

Earlier this week I found myself having to host a web meeting and was determined to find the best free live webcasting solution. There are a few out there now but none seemed to have as many features as DimDim. I created an account in about 2 minutes. Created a meeting space and sent out invites in another minute.

Sending out invites asks the respondants to create a new account. This isn’t much of a hassle for them, however I figured out that you can just email them the meeting link they provide, allowing others to join the meeting without signing up. A nice bonus. Everyone was able to join the meeting quickly, without a single technical problem (a first in web meetings!).

Once you’re in, Dimdim allows you to share whatever is on your screen (after installing a small plugin on your computer). It also has a handy Whiteboard feature that allows all attendees to collaborate by typing, drawing, diagraming, doodling, etc. on a shared space. You can also use your computer’s built-in mic so they can hear you, use their free call-in number so they can call if they don’t have access to a computer, and you can record your entire session for later viewing or sharing. There’s a ton more features you can check out here.

The free version allows up to 20 attendees in a meeting at once, which I’d imagine is fine for the average user. If you need more there’s an upgraded version that allows up to 100 attendees at once for $99 a year, not bad.

Now lets just see how much longer the IT departments of the world will be able to handle the other options before they switch to something a little more “web 2.0ey.”

As an internet marketer, keyword research and analysis takes up a big portion of my day. I am constantly trying to find creative new ways to illustrate to clients that the keywords people enter into the search engines can tell us almost everything we need know about them – where are they in the buying cycle, what exactly about a product are they interested in, how much they are willing to spend, and more…

For those of you who need even further proof of the revealing nature of keywords look no further than Google.org’s Flu Trends project. Google realized that they could use their wealth of keyword data for the greater good by releasing search trends relating to flu keywords.

We have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for “flu” is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries from each state and region are added together. We compared our query counts with data from a surveillance system managed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and found that some search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening. By counting how often we see these search queries, we can estimate how much flu is circulating in various regions of the United States.

They don’t say which keywords they monitor for this project but I’m sure it includes ones like “flu symptoms,” “headaches,” “fever,” etc. Check out a Google Trends search I ran for “flu symptoms.” You can see that the trends look very similar to their Flu Trends reports.
Google Flu Trends is remarkably accurate when compared to the CDC’s reports. The big difference is that Google’s reports are practically real-time whereas the CDC is 2 weeks or more delayed. I would also imagine that producing this is costing Google much less than it costs the CDC, being that they are using data that is already collected.

It will be interesting to see how seriously this innovation will be taken by the medical community. If Google decides to release more in-depth information then we could start to determine exactly what symptoms are affecting the public and the severity of these symptoms – FYI, this is already possible using Google’s Adwords Tool if you have the time and the knowhow. I am also curious to see where else they will take this concept. People search Google for every topic imaginable and useful trends can be released in any number of areas – presidential public approval, stock market activity, awareness of issues, etc.

If any of you logged into Gmail lately you would have noticed their announcement, “New! A bunch of stuff”

What strikes me as odd is that everything I saw on their new features list has been around for at least a few weeks, if not years.

• Gmail welcomes your AIM friends – at least a few years old
• Gmail has a new look on the iPhone browser – a month old
• Group chat – a few months old – they had the button on there for a long time but it only recently started working

Granted, several of the features, such as new emoticons, are new as of the past week. I guess they are just trying to give the loyal Gchat users a page to forward to their Hotmail friends that’ll show them what they’re missing out on. Touché Googlé!

A new site called Tabbloid emails you a PDF “magazine” version of your favorite blogs. Just enter the rss feed or feeds and how often you’d like to be updated. You can have it send you a new edition every week.

I can see a few good uses for this

• Use it to view blogs offline. Upload it to your iPhone, or read in the subway or on a flight.
• Bloggers can offer weekly PDF’d versions of their blogs to readers. This would be beneficial to non-technical readers who are not yet familiar with RSS and newsreaders. It allows readers to easily email and pass around your content. You can use it for a weekly email newsletter that is well formatted and ready to send.
• Busy executives can have their assistants create them a weekly newsletter of only the most relevant blog posts. It is a good alternative to sending someone a long list of links and is good for those who are technically challenged.

Tabbloid PDF RSS Docs

Check out an example Tabbloid that I generated here. It was made from my Google Reader Shared Items feed.

Not that I’m that old, but when I first started doing internet marketing it was slightly before the time when the majority started seeing the potential of the internet as a marketing vehicle (web 1.8). When I told someone I was an internet marketer the first thing they said was, “you’re the guy who sends me all that junk mail.”

Now when I tell people (even non-marketers) about my job they have some kind of idea of what I do. The questions I get now are mostly around the concept of Social Media. What is it? Where is it heading? I don’t see how the pictures of my dog I share with my friends could ever make companies money?

Well those are some pretty major concepts, so instead of delving into each I’m going to give you some of the most helpful links about the concepts that I’ve come across.

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What is Social Media?

Wikipedia’s definition of Social Media – primarily Internet-based tools for sharing and discussing information among human beings. The term most often refers to activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio. This interaction, and the manner in which information is presented, depends on the varied perspectives and “building” of shared meaning among communities, as people share their stories and experiences.

A presentation: What The F**K is Social Media?

Where is it heading?

• Social networks will be like air
• Social media is the future of business and personal life (and will one day save the world)

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I don’t see how the pictures of my dog I share with my friends could ever make companies money?

Wikipedia’s definition of Social Media Marketing (SMM) is a form of internet marketing which seeks to achieve branding and marketing communication goals through the participation in various social media networks such as MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, YouTube, Dailymotion, Hi5, Gather.com, social web applications (webapps) such as reddit, Digg, Stumbleupon, Flickr, iLike, Wikipedia, Squidoo, Last.fm, Twitter, Eventful, ePinions and others as well as within 3D virtual worlds such as Second Life, ActiveWorlds, Moove and There.com.

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Further Reading

• Alltop’s Top Social Media Blogs
• Dosh Dosh’s very thorough article series on Social Media

Are you the only one using your username online? You should be. Your username is your identity online and there are advantages to using the same name for across online accounts

• Easier to remember
• People in your social networks can recognize you
• You can craft your reputation online through your username

It’s not realistic to keep up with creating your user name on every email, social network, photo storage, blog, etc. website. But, when you see a new site come up that has potential, or that you’ve been meaning to use at some point, it is worth taking the minute to make a profile with your screen name. I suggest having a “throwaway” email account to register to prevent having excess junk mail being sent to your regular email account.

Another benefit of creating the accounts is that you will have control over more of the top results in the search engines for “your name” keywords – a prime objective of any online reputation management campaign. This is especially important if you have a common name and would like to be the one who people see when your name is Googled. This is also a great tactic if you are well-known and would like to prevent online vandals from having their way with your name.

AC/DC released a new music video this week on their website. This is no ordinary video, this is spreadsheet ASCII Art!

I know, spreadsheets aren’t typically mentioned in the same sentence as sex, drugs, and rock&roll (and neither has AC/DC for about 15 years), but this is worth checking out. Download the excel file here or if you’re feeling lazy just watch the youtube video below.

The internets is ripe for mashing up different technologies and this is a great example of how, these days, a new artform can be created overnight. Not to say they’re all going to have staying power, but they are worth noting. Surprisingly, this video has created a moderate buzz in the viral video-sphere, with about 160k views on Youtube as of writing, 3 days after they released the video. This seems like it would be the kind of video to gain slow and steady views from the interoffice email chain crowd.

One day last year I decided it would be a good idea to make a customized music player for my music productions. I didn’t want to use any of those standard players, I didn’t want to have to code html, I just wanted to design a cool interface.

So, I decided Flash would be the best avenue – despite the fact that I didn’t know flash at all. I had seen my roommate design in Flash and I though it would be no problem. My idea was to make an MPC drum machine that will allow you to play the drum machine using your computer keyboard. Also, if you click on each pad with your mouse it will play one of my songs. Seemed like an easy idea at the time, but as a total beginner it was a long development process. This turned out to be a great project to get a good understanding of Flash and have a good time doing it.

Here’s a (very) quick rundown of how I developed it:

Read a bunch of tutorials on Flash design. Started out with a stock picture of an Akai MPC2000 and Photoshopped my logo over theirs. Imported the image to Flash.

Added buttons to each drum pad on the pic. Wrote actionscript that triggers a different drum pad sound on a mouse hover. Assigned each of the drumpads to a keyboard key. Wrote actionscript to trigger a different song for each pad on mouse click. Actionscript for play, stop, volume, MPC displaying the song titles, etc.

And there you have it, no you can build your very own custom flash drum machine/streaming music player! JK, it wasn’t that easy, and I don’t have the time to write about all the development steps here. If anyone is actually interested in learning the ins and outs of this please feel free to drop me a line and I’d be glad to help.

Now have fun with a version of the drum machine below, or play the full sized version at my DJ Chima site homepage. It’s easy to use, just hover over “instructions” to see how. And as with any flash module, you have to click anywhere on the picture in order for it to let you use your keyboard keys to play the drum pads.

That’s right everybody, I have decided to start a new blog, this time under andychimicles.com

Up until now I have been putting all of my posts under blog.djchima.com.
I’ve decided that although I have a wide spectrum of interests a lot of
people may not. Therefore I am using blog.djchima.com for all my music
production related posts, and blog.andychimicles.com for all my internet, marketing, and techonolgy related posts.

More to come soon…