It was an honor, privilege, and a hoot to be invited to come to Melbourne to do a 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story presentation for the PLP Network project here.

This all came about because in October, during my road trip, I paid a visit to the home of Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach in Virginia Beach (get it, beach? beach?). We have known each other for a long time online but had never met in carbon form. Over dinner, she told me that her colleague, Will Richardson (whom I did not get to meet on the loop) was unable to attend the culminating meeting for their project in Australia, and would I be interested in going in his place to do a keynote?

I think I said yes before her question ended.

Thanks Will, we had way too much fun talking about my qualifications being a pony tail. Thanks for also sending me the audio clip I used to introduce you as one my my online avatars:

Will Richardson intro

So that was my meal ticket to make the big crossing, but you have to bring your best stuff, and I hope I did. I mixed up my usual presentation with some new elements.

All of the presentation stuff, including slides and links are at http://50ways.wikispaces.com/plpconnectu. I had thought about doing a live broadcast to ds106 radio, but port 8010 seemed to be blocked, so I recorded my own audio.

Audio archive of presentation (71.7 Mb / 1:14:40)

I had my Keynote autotweeting in active mode, to share links, and draw people in from the outside when the activities started.

The reason this was special is because the very first 50 Ways workshop was done in Australia, back in October 2007 on my 2 week whistle stop tour of every capital city for the Flexible Learning Framework.

So I started with the Amazing FLower story that happened there, for no other reason than is pretty amazing.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

I also used a more recent story that came out of a presentation I did for Alec Couros’s ECI831 class, one that Kevin Stranack shared about a bit of family discovery that started with one out of the blue email.

Before going into the 50 Ways bit, I set up a few activities based on the ARG activity Sheryl and her team had set up for the participants here- it was a story about the PLP penguin, Periwinkle who had somehow gotten him/herself tied up in a boxing match with a tough kangaroo named Joey.

The think is we know about this as an event, but I wanted the groups to do some work on how these characters developed their personalities, do some creative activities to develop their personas. I went back to an activity I learned of in the late 1990s, when I worked on a project at maricopa with a colleague Liz Warren, who teaches at South Mountain Community College.

We took an activity she had already developed to foster creative writing, built around the ideas of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, and made into a web tool for that and more. Stunningly, it still sits on the web server at Maricopa, though it is not fully functionally — see http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/smc/journey.

This really happened because by another sheer accident of timing, the night after I returned home from my 5 month road trip, Liz was doing a live storytelling event in Pine, AZ, and I went to see Tellebration again and to say hello.

Anyhow, before the writing prompt questions for the 17 steps of the Hero’s Journey, Liz developed a series of questions designed to help outline the main character’s traits; and I used these same ones for my group.

I split the room in tow, and had half the room work on the questions about Joey’s character and half do the same questions about Peri (created in open Google docs) — they took to it with more activity and energy than I could have dreamed of!

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

I had to pull them out of the google docs while they were still writing and laughing.

To use thids material and introduce them to another tool, I asked for a volunteer to come up on stage and lead the choices of photo for a 5 card flickr story (I had gotten people to tag about 300 photos with the project tag plpconnectu).

Lois was a great sport (see her story) — I set the group out to do their own, and again, they really ran with this activity.

We still had a lot of ground to cover.

I wanted to extend the story development process, again leaning on Liz Warren’s Hero’s Journey approach. I made the groups switch, the people who had worked on Joey’s character, now had to review the traits about Peri, and enter the responses to the Call to Adventure stage for Peri — and likewise, the other group do the same for Joey’s Call to Adventure

Again- well I had to work hard to get their attention back. I then got two more volunteers to come up on stage and do a pechaflickr round of improv /a> with those plpconnecu tagged photos.

Both Trish and … (ugh was it Rob) both did pechaflickr the way I envisioned it; not be being 100% literal, but also by keeping their banter moving between slides.

I had to rev the session into 9th gear, running through the media search and the examples. We clearly did not have time for them to do the story creation with the 50+ tools, but I had but one more new trick in my bag.

I told them that I have been asked to develop a thing that would help pick the right tool for people, and I had that ready- it was devised to take biometric input and learning analytics to provide a predictive tool selection- all they needed to do was click “pick” on the 50 Ways Tool Picker

And that was the whole show.

I have to say this was one of the most high powered groups I’ve gotten to present 50 ways to– and I have had some great groups. It changes the whole atmosphere when you have people who are on the edges of their seat and willing to jump in and play.

And with that, my work here in Australia is done, and its 2 weeks of play time.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

Time to go play!

I first uploaded the video to dotSub. I thne noticed that it had an option to import a caption file (which I dont have in the proper format). But… I know that YouTube can do a fair job of filling in captions if you can provide it a text version of the script. And I had a script made when I made the movie (I did have to go back and re-edit, a the narrator went off script a lot- that was me).

And YouTube does an okay job, some of the timing is a little off:

But it offers the option to download the caption file… which I could then add to dotSUB, which now should have English captions.

All I need now is for some people to go into dotSUB and translate the captions into other languages (which I have always thought would be a supreme activity for language students).

Give it a whirl, with the version of 50+Ways on dotSUB

Last night was a presentation for Dean Shareski‘s ECMP 355 Course (no web site?), which I believe is a University of Regina course for pre-service teachers, “Computers in the Classroom”. And I did two more ones today for the Powerful Learning Practice group from El Paso that Sheryl Nusbaum-Beach and Will Richardson leave. I gotta give Sheryl and hear team a to of credit in providing tech support to these teachers; they had them ALL verify and test their voice connection before I started, and rally provided a lot of energy to the back channel.

All the participants were highly active, and took on my game of story prompts, this time using an open white board in Elluminate (I squint and ignore the corporate name on the login screen). A lot of thees teachers are already making use of ones like Voicethread, Glogster and Animoto, but also a number them like Blabberize and today there was strong interest in Tikatok and Zooburst.

I did not have time to add it today, but my long time Apple buddy Paul Valach shared this example, which is a 2-fer– a teacher has set of a Clogster site for linking to student projects that explain math principles, each one of those links is an Animoto video. Check it out http://clsatb123.edu.glogster.com/math-animoto/.

I’ve found that with variable network connections, its not worth doing live demos of the tools, so I talk through examples I have screenshots for. I do upload a quicktime version of the Dominoe story which does play well in the space (it is disturbing to hear how many teachers have to work in environments of blocked sites, it suggests that school systems teach their most valued employees as children),

I don’t have links for Elluminate archives yet, but I recorded my own audio from the session for Dean’s class, and loaded it in Slideshare with my slides (I like doing this since this method is one of the 50)

I still enjoy doing this presentation, though I prefer not at this frequency. I dont want to become one of Those Guys Who Do the Same Shtick For Everyone. I still have a chunk of updates to do for the new wiki, and still have about 15-20 tools waiting in the wings to write up.

The new wiki format is designed for other people to edit the descriptions of the tools, add their own examples, and share some feedback on the usefulness of the tool (see how to add to the wiki). I have also created a new wiki page that lists the tools that have special features for teachers. This page, and the Tools by Type and Tools by Media Capability are generated automatically based on a structure of tags I set up.

After all this, I sure feel like Curly does in this photo

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by mfhiatt

This was created for today’s keynote at the Learning Connections District Champions meeting in Toronto. When Deb invited me to speak she asked me to do a video she could use to summarize the workshop after it ended. I really should have just turned on the web cam and blabbed away, and I might have been done in an hour.

But I had this half idea to piece together a message from it using the tools themselves, so I wrote a script, and assigned tools for each line. For the tools that have audio or video capability, I use it directly; otherwise, I made voice-overs in iMovie. To capture the animated/bviudeo segments, I did screen capture with iShowU.

The slides for today’s session are posted on Slideshare

This was a highly charged group! They are all leading and techie teachers from the districts across Ontario that work with this project. Part of this new version of my presentation/workshops is a new wiki (discussed below(, but I wanted to try a different approach in a hands on workshop. Typically, I do my overview, and have people get ago at making a story of their own choosing with any of the tools.

In the vein of doing the same story in multiple tools (like I did originally with my Dominoe story), in the part where I do some audience suggestions for a story prompt, I asked the group (of about 40) to put and organize their ideas on an open google doc where I had set a starting prompt:

The Most Amazing Thing Happened Yesterday at the CN Tower

The plan, which pretty much fell apart, is that the group would create an outline that would be the basis for them using in the later section. It was fun to see 40 people madly toss ideas into a wiki, but it became a mish mosh, with Steohen harper, a homeless person, Charlie Sheen, hockey, and the Queen making appearances. The doc is still there, but I turned off the public editing — bit.ly/lc11-story-prompt.

In a rare occurrence for this activity, Elvis did NOT make an appearance.

For the next part, where I talk about finding media, I wanted a way for them to create a pool of images, maybe video, they could find using the sources provided on the wiki- I asked them to post some information to a google form. This did work, with about 34 people adding something. If I did it again, I’d simplify the form. Some people got tripped up in trying to pick the license- next time, I would just have a checkbox to confirm what they found was licensed for re-use. It did being up questions and a few of them were not familiar with the various creative commons flavors.

I was also not quite clear that when they shared the URL for a flickr photo page, that I did not give them enough detail on where they need to go to get the actual file if they opted to use it.

But all of this hardly mattered, because once in the game, they were all deeply immersed. I’m waiting to see what kind of things they produce.

And as usual, they all had a first good laugh at Blabberize but then as I watched what people were trying, that was one of the most common ones chosen.

A highlight for me came later, when one of the participants, a principal told me how she put this funny tool to use right away by doing a quick skype with a teacher at her school who was dealing with a troublesome student. Here she is telling me in a video I recorded on my iPhone:

As alluded to earlier, this qworkshop used the newest version of the wiki (I am still working on) at http://50ways.wikispaces.com/). The first version (http://cogdogroo.wiksipaces.com/50+Ways) is still on the wiki I made for my 2007 visit to Australia, and I’ve been wanting to redo it in a new structure, and especially, open more doors for ways people can produce it (although the original is in a wiki I locked all the pages because, frankly, some editors kept messing it up!).

In the time since, I’ve learned some good tricks to use in Wikispaces. The big one is that each of the tool pages is locked still, but I have three sections on each that CAN be edited, because the Description, Examples, and Feedback content are stand alone along wiki pages that are open to edits; I can incorporate them into the tool page by using one of the widgets.

On the old wiki’s tools page, all the tools were described in a long monster scrolling list. In the new one, wiki, the tools are organized in a main page by using page tags to put them into categories (by type of tool), which is nicely updated as I add new tool pages. Each tool, then has its own page, including:

• link to the category page for the type of tools (this allows me to put something like Slideroll into both the Slideshow category and the Video one).
• A Screen shot of the editing interface
• Descrption*
• Link to and embedded version of the Dominoe story created in the tool.
• List of examples of other content created in the same tool*
• A list of comments/advice from people who have used the tool before*

*All three of these sections are opened to edits.

As an example, let’s look at this portion of the page for One True Media

Again, only I, as lord and master of the wiki, can edit this page directly. But anyone who joins the wiki has access to edit the content that provides the text on the red box; they are actually editing a different wiki page that is unlocked. They can go to the page and click “edit” via the link in the green box, but by checking the “editable” box in the “Include Wiki Page” widget, it enables that small EDIT link which opens up the content to be edited and returns to the enclosing page when done.

I ask anywhere people add examples or content, that they “sign” their contributions by appending the 4 tilde (~~~~) string, which when publishes, records a time stamp and link to the author.

It’s my hope, then I can get some people involved with adding examples, feedback, and even improving my descriptions.

As of tonight, I am still 15 tools short of having moved all of the old ones over, plus a batch of brand new ones sitting in the entryway. I want to get these loaded, as I have been procrastinating this a long while. It has also been good to review the ways some of the tools have evolved (and some have gone to the Island of Lost/Dead Tools).

It’s interesting to note that a good number of these are still around since I first spotted them in 2007, ones that have obscure names like Image Loop, Rock You, Comic Sketch. It’s nice to see that my 4 year old, infrequently used logins still work. It’s also interesing to see that some, which likely were one person experiments, have become mainstreamed:

• Kerpoof is now a part of Disney.
• Tabblo was purchased and supported by HP
• Tikatok is now owned by Barnes and Noble

Quite a few of them have gone to a tiered model,. where you get advanced features by paying for membership (Xtranormal is close to falling off the list since you can only do one basic movie with the free account), and others seem to be trying to make money be offering print services.

Oh, the other new thing has been using another set of tags to indicate what kinds of media the tools can use (e/g/ can upload audio, can import photos from Picassa and Facebook), so that there is a grid to choose tools by Media Capability.

I’ll get another chance to try this all out next week, when I get to do another iteration of 50+ Ways at Baruch College in New York City.

This is, easily, one of my projects that has grown a lot of legs, and I want to keep them moving along. I’m open to ideas on the site

I’ve always wanted to have more examples to include, and ds106 provides, abides, subsidizes…What is really cool is that they seem to be covering every tool, even the obscure ones. I’ll be combing through them all soon, and will be rolling into the new version of the site I need to round out over the next months. Part of the new model is making it easier for people to add directly to the site.

In tribute, I whipped together a comic with gnomz, which has been around a long, long time (gnmoz can be wonky, the embed is not working so I did a full page screen grab with Aviary) Full comic is at http://en.gnomz.com/227499-50-nuggets.html

Take a long nap, Jack,
Make a big snore, Elanor.
Dont need to be awake, Jake,
Just listen to me.

Eek, time slipped away and I was not paying attention to ds106 assignment 3 referring to 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story.

I’m excited to see what people create ’cause it means I will have a bunch of new examples to add to the site.

A caveat, I’ve been dragging my paws on updating that site. Well, I did start with a new one, but it is not filled out — I have a new design that will be (hopefully) better organized/structured, and offer more routes in to have people contribute. But alas, it is about 48 short, but FYI can be found at http://50ways.wikispaces.com. As is, the old one is most complete, but keep in mind that some of descriptions are a bit outdated.

a href=”http://50ways.wikispaces.com”

Read more about the new version at http://cogdogblog.com/2010/11/03/50ways-2-0/ but mainly, I wanted to let ds106 folks know that there is a raft of new tools in the wings.

And this might be the kick on the flanks I need to wake up and finish the update. Well, after I figure out what new things I can create besides another Dominoe story.

And…. after I finish this nap.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by The Little Pecan

It’s been on my mind for months to recast the site into a new version. Much of the information needs updates, some of the tools have fallen off the vine– it was time for a fresh coat of paint. I got the perfect driving inspiration when a colleague asked me to do a version of the workshop for the 2010 Museum Computer Network Conference a week ago, in Austin.

I had nailed down a new wikispaces site and got most of the structure set up in time for the conference, and the new home is at http://www.mcn.edu/mcn-2010-austin. It has the three parts of the story making process (Outline a story Idea, Find Media, and Pick a Tool). I have my 50+ Dominoe Stories. There are New Tools to be added and the Island of Lost Tools.

What remains are the updates on all the tools, which feels like its going to take 50 days or weeks or…

The question surely one would ask, “Well you do have this in a wiki, why not let others write it for you?” I do have an answer– wikis are great for collecting raw info, brainstorming, but I’ve found for a structured web site– well people will kind of crap all over the wiki. They do not intend to, but I have a clear design in mind, so the entire first version of the site was only editable by me.

I have a way around this using a seldom known feature of wikis I first got into with MediaWiki, but is also present in Wikispaces. It is the concept of includes. So I can have pages in my wiki that are only editable by me, but I can designate a place in the wiki to insert the content of another wikipage– and since that one I can make editable, it means I can allow people to edit the content for select portions of the page.

There are other ways to use such includes- common sidebar navigations, page footers. The beauty is you can use these on multiple pages, and if you change the original, all the changes are seen on pages that include the original. It is extremely powerful.

In the Wikispaces editor, this is one of the widgets- and from the list of options, choose Contents of a Wiki Page

So I just need to make these stub content pages for the content I want to leave open and editable, and on the main page, just provide a way for people to get to the stubs (anyone wishing to do this must join the wiki).

The other problem was that giant long tools page, it listed them all, the examples, and more. It had over 750 hyperlinks hanging off of it (I ran a link check on it and watched the progress). I know people got value out of the full list, but I had an inkling to do a bit more.

So the new structure, of which there are only a handful built out completely, will be each tool has its own page. This allows me to do some other tricks to automatically generate the List of Tools pages, and even other pages tat will list, say all the Slideshow tools. The trick is to tag each tool page with a tag of say 50tools and I will have a complete A-Z index page by using one of the other widgets to List all Pages with a tag; a list for each kind of tool (see Slideshow Tools), and the main Story Tools index will have the tools grouped by type (multiple widgets hanging in a table there) — these is only a partial example now because most of the individual tools pages are not created, but by using tags, these lists automatically update them selves since they are based on tags:

I have new features on the new individual tools pages. Each will include a tool type (linked to the tools type pages so you can see other timeline tools, for example). There will be a screen shot of the tool and the editing screen. I am adding a listing of the types of media you can import and the other media that is available from a library. The example of the Dominoe story created for each will be linked, but the embedded version will be right there on the page. The new editable sections will include:

• tool description- these change so I’d welcome help in filling out and correction the descriptions.
• Examples If you create something with any of the tools, you can add your own link, and like all of the editable content areas, I ask people to add the code for a wiki signature (~~~~) which when published converts to a time stamp and link to the user that edited the page.
• Impressions This is a place to say more about how well the tool worked or did not work for you, as useful information for others when they are reviewing the tools.

Below is an example showing where these new features are on the Tool page for Slide:

The other pages that are open to edit is the one for new tools and the part of the Story Media page that lists sources of media. I have set up a new page that describes the ways you can contribute to the new site. And because I do not have all of the places ready to add examples, I have a Google form embedded there so you can get me information about your examples.

I’m feeling really good about this new design, and actually it wont take 50 years or months, or maybe not even 50 days to round out the site. I am really happy with the features the Wikispaces offer, and there are even more things under the hood I’ve yet to tap into.

So join the wiki if you think you’d like to help, and keep tuned for the new tool pages as the sprout up. Th new 50+ Ways site again is at http://50ways.wikispaces.com/.

You just slip out the back, Jack
Make a new plan, Stan
You don’t need to be coy, Roy
Just get yourself free
Hop on the bus, Gus
You don’t need to discuss much
Just drop off the key, Lee
And get yourself free.

Jon Breitenbucher invited me back again to do a remote (via Skype) presentation on 50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story for the week-long Instructional Technology Faculty Fellows program he and his crew run at the College of Wooster (by the way, they are rocking with wordpress multiuser there).

When I did this last year, it was one of the best sessions I’ve had; a lot because Jon’s team had prepped the faculty, so they already had done some pre-work to pick their story idea. The way we run it is I do the presentation first thing in the morning (wich was really early here on the west coast time!), the faculty spend about 3 hours working with the tools. We then convene after they are done, and they get to talk about what they were able to create (or the problems they had).

This time around, I used Google Presenter for the slides, and we did me on video over Skype to the group in Wooster. I had a slide deck I’d used before for other sessions, and made all the links for URLs as hyperlinks. What did not work well, and I;ve had mixed luck before, was using it in presentation mode, where me clicking the slides advances it for Jon’s computer at the other end. I’ve had it work before, but this time, no matter how many times I would “take control”, when I advanced, the only way to update for them was for me to “take control” again. So we went old school.. me saying “Next slide”

You can see the slides over at http://bit.ly/50ways-wooster and I also have
audio recorded in my Ediro.

I felt bad a few people really struggled with some of the tools- Quite a few of them tried Joggle, one of the tools I rarely look at, someone had issues where Tikatok failed to save their work. It’s hard to tell if it is an isolated experience or if the tool is flaky, and I struggle with how to list that on my tools site (I started addind user reports as Devon has told me of problems with xtimeline).

But you can see the great stuff they did on their twitter-like wordpress site http://faculty-fellows-2010.voices.wooster.edu/ — I am mining their as new examples to add to my 50 Ways site.

And one person had a suggestion which may appear as “Larry’s List”- he asked for which were the 10 top tools; i’ve hesitated to do this because it is a bit subjective, but I think its worthy to share which have the combination of best features and likely reliability.

I have some plans to roll out a new 50Ways wiki (already nabbed the wikispaces spot) to make it open for more people to contribute. The current 50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story wiki is set for me only to edit, since I used it a lot for presentations; I had it open to members for a bit, but someone indvertantly wiped out some chunks.

But I have these ideas for a new more open wiki, and am widely open to suggestions:

• All of the existing materials will be moved over there
• Put each tool on its own page, have a screen shot, a more detailed description, a list of pros and cons, tags to identify both the type of tools (Slideshow, Map) as well as the types of media supported)
• The tags could be used to list all associated tools, so you can more easily get to the ones that allow you to import audio, or ones that use video, or ones that are presentation tools
• When people contribute, I will have them use the wikispaces code to add their “signature” to the page as a contributor
• Tool pages would be open to edit, so people can add more examples, or modify the description. I really want to have more, and better relevant educational examples.
• I’ll keep the main list under lock, so as people create new tool pages, I will add them once they have all the “parts”; I’ll provide a template for the tool page

I had dreamed of having this ready for this week’s preso, but stuff just keeps getting in the way!

It went fine, I had fun, people laughed at the Blabberize Alpaca. There is an audio recording coming from EDMEDIA, which is going to be full of me popping my p’s a bit loudly. It was a few days before that I realized I was missing a key cultural reference:

Hawaii 50+ Ways the trailer

Going into this I felt I needed something new as an angle. ED-MEDIA is a big international conference, and swirls around the thousands of papers presented. Egads, I needed something academic?

I’m really ready to hang it up and retire the shtick. This time I tried to take a tack of emphasizing some things I suggested were more important than the tools, some things I called “the craft” and aimed to hang them on some of the examples.

• A story must clearly arc to an end, to a “punchline.”
• Distill a story down to only its most necessary elements.
• If you cannot create media, modify or re-purpose.
• Think and tell in metaphors and symbols.
• Be creative within a limited tool set.
• The act of locating media is a key craft

I did get the audience to join in the group story game where they had to contribute to the prompt:

Under a Full Moon, Last Night I Saw The Strangest Thing Happen On Waikiki Beach

(as usual) it involved Elvis singing “Blue Hawaii” and then he was dancing with a shark… someone has to wrap that one up.

And also as usualy lots of people want t know what software the presentation was done in.

“That’s the web”

and it is! It’s just images, some RSS, and the CoolIris plugin– all building on what I outlined in CoolIris as a Presentation tool. It’s a bit easier now to run your own image slide shows, even from your desktop, and Scott Leslie keeps pounding at other ways to create shows– but to me, the most powerful method is rolling your own RSS feeds since you can then define the web link for each slide. That is the reason I use CoolIris as it is nearly ideal for doing presentations about web sites because of the way it moves back and forth from presentation to web and back.

A few new wrinkles I tossed in this time:

• For candy on the eye candy, I added my own logo to the CoolIiris menu bar. Easy stuff.
• Ever since May, something changed in either CoolIris or Flash (and no one is owning up) so that my previously working FLV videos that played inside the CoolIris wall now refused to play. They just spin and spin and spin, and CoolIris is not even acknowledging this as a bug. I ran an end around by doing anormal image and link to a web page– a page I created that autoplayed my flash video in a web player- e,g, http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/50ways/hawaii-50-ways.html
• Almost by accident– yes it was an accident or a typo– I found a new CoolIris trick. The normal thing is to make a thumbnail image by making copy of the full size image but smaller dimensions II do mine as 240 pixel wide JPEGs). While testing, I had noticed that I had a thumbnail of a different image than the full size- and when played in CoolIris, you get some neat transition effects. I used it on a few slides- as shown in the video below, not sure if it comes through as an effect (or a gimmick):
  cool iris trick

A few other notes on my mad methods- I do everything to avoid the inevitable Sucky Hotel Internet. So I run my presentation in a web browser, but running locally from Apache running on my MacBookPro. That makes it run a little faster. IN addition, because of the awkward pauses while waiting for web sites to load– all of the external sites I planned to use I had pre-loaded as tabs in my browser, so all I needed to do was to minimize the CoolIris interface, and flip to the right tab.

So that was 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story, Hawaiian Style (pineapple and Canadian bacon??).

Book ‘em, Dominoe.

I hear from folks who want easier ways to run presos in CoolIris (if you missed that boat, get the cool Firefox add on)- and there are more options now, including running it from a set of photos on your desktop, and likely the easiest, IMHO, is to create a flickr set and view that in CoolIris.

A recent tweak I found, which adds zero to the presentation itself, but I could not resist, is the new ability to add your own custom logo to the CoolIris menu bar:

This is just a PNG file (useful because you can use PNG transparency to avoid Logo in a Box) I have stored in an images directory on the root level of my web site– it’s just another line in your media.rss file right after the first tag. The image should be no higher than 26 pixels so it fits in the bar

<channel>
<atom:icon>/images/cogdog-piclens.png</atom:icon>

You typically would be using a full URL, but this is because of another presentation “trick” I do with CoolIris- I do not run the presentation from the web (oh the joys of conference hotel internet) but from a web server running locally on my laptop- so my desktop URL is http://www.cogdogblog.loc/…. and I use relative links to keep everything in tact.

So it’s not really crucial, but just a Neat Thing to Do.

A current frustration with CoolIris is that either the newer version of it or Flash v10 has broken the ability to play FLV videos inside CoolIris- I can view videos fine from YouTube, but nothing works as it did a month ago for my own spun shows. Dean Shareski did send a link from the developers site acknowledging this (and that link is now gone), the developer forums have others asking about this, I even got a tweet response from CoolIris where they acted surprised– but the point is the method that worked in May 2009 to embed FLV inside custom mediaRSS now fails.

One approach would be to uninstall flash 10 and roll back to 9. What a PITA. For now, I am just changing my strategy, and not putting the FLVs in my mediaRSS file, but building an image representational screen, and using the link option to jump out to my own web page that has the video embedded. Not as elegant but you do what you can….

So as a sneak preview, it was just a few days ago that I realized I had missed a major cultural reference that fit in well for my presentation in Hawaii:

50 Ways Hawaiian Style

The real reason I like using CoolIris, beyond the “wow” effect, is that ability to jump out to URLs in the middle of a preso (simply by assigning the URL in the ... tag) and to easily jump back to where you were before. I may adjust this in the live presentation, because there is a wait period while the URL loads in a new tab- for just my presentation version, I plan to pre-load all my externals in tabs, and just jump out of CoolIris to go right to the site. It can be awkward standing on stage waiting for the site to load.

Book ‘em Domin-O!