Phil Bradley's weblog

Flip Ultra HD Review

I've seen adverts for these around, so I thought I'd get one and try it out. Not that I actually *need* a new video camera, oh no. I have one that uses tape and one that doesn't. I have one on my iPod. Do I use these? Nope. The one that uses tape uses tape, and as a result it's quite large and bulky. The one that doesn't use tape is rather better, but it's still not what you'd call small. So I've seen people talking about the Flip range and thought I'd try one out. You check out their site if you're interested. The one that I got is a black 8GB HD one. It's about 6 ounces and roughly the same size as a cigarette packet if you squished it a bit smaller and made it longer. It has a start button to start recording, which toggles into a stop recording. No pause. There's a simple zoom in and zoom out - these are buttons, rather than touchscreen, and that's just about it! I took a short video, and here it is - I'm in it for a few moments, so steel yourself..

I thought the quality was reasonable, but nothing special. The zoom isn't what I was hoping for and if you try and view video in full screen it does look a little bit blocky and pixilated. You can't actually do much with the video itself - chop it a bit, add in opening/end credits and that's about it.

The downloading was simple though - you flip out a USB arm and slot it into your computer. This does leave the unit dangling around though, which I didn't like, and this also makes the connection slightly unreliable in my opinion. However, the software kicks in, downloads reasonably quickly and then lets you top/tail and uploading to a YouTube account was a snip.

I'm not convinced about the battery - there have been lots of complaints about the rechargable batteries (2 AA battery pack size) not working properly, and I had mine sitting charging in the computer for hours. I got a full green bar, plugged it back in again and got an indication it was almost out of power, which isn't impressing me greatly.

I'm not particularly enthusiastic about it; it's the kind of thing worth having in a handbag or oversized pockets if you think there's a chance you'll want to video something, and I reckon it would be fine for some voxpop stuff but if you can only have one video camera, I'd be inclined to save up for something better to be honest.

PhotoSketch is quite simply stunning

PhotoSketch: Internet Image Montage from tao chen on Vimeo.

If they can actually bring this to market, this resource is going to have a huge impact in so many areas - advertising, art, education and so on.

Vodpod; a home for your collected videos

I don't know if you're like me, but for some reason I always find it a pain to track down and keep links to my favourite videos. Yes, I add them to my bookmarks, link to them from Netvibes, but there's always something a bit missing. Well today I discovered Vodpod and set up Phil Bradley on Vodpod which is a collection of all the videos that interest me and that I use on courses. (Well, not all, but I'm getting there.) Really simple - set up a free account, add a browser bookmarklet and when you see a video that you like, click on the bookmark and add it to your collection. Add in tags and your own summary to taste and you're done.

The interesting thing is that this collection runs from a Vodpod URL, and doesn't take you back to the original site, such as YouTube. I'm wondering if this is going to be a way for school librarians and teachers to provide access to these useful resources if YouTube is blocked - anyone who has a chance to try this out - please let me know.

You can also add in publication widgets to post to your blog, twitter, facebook and so on for instant updating. Nice, simple and straightfoward - I like it!

Did you know 4.0

If you watched the original 'Shift happens' video, (and lets face it, most of us did) you may be interested to know that a newly updated version, Did you know 4.0 has now been released. It tends to focus on convergence, rise of social media, fall of traditional sources and comes with lots of facts and figures (together with citations!) It's certainly interesting and I'll be using it in my sessions this year, though I don't find it as compelling as the original version. Sequels huh?

loband for those times broadband doesn't work

loband is a great concept. Visit the website and pop in the URL of the site/page that you're interested in. It'll then go off, grab the page, strip out all the broadband intensive stuff, images and wotnot and give you the basics. It's not pretty, but if you are on a slow connection, or maybe a mobile this is certainly worth giving a shot.

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• Sustainable Loband in the Cloud? (treehugger.com)

ScreenToaster online screen recorder

I've just started to play around with a resource called 'Screentoaster' which allows users to create their own line screencasts without downloading any software and for free. I'm very impressed so far - I've only tried doing a really quick screencast - a demonstration of the Icerocket Big Buzz search, but it's simple, easy to use, fast and effective. I've used a voice over with this show - have your speakers turned on if you want to hear what I'm saying, but there's also an option for having onscreen captions as well. It's also possible to add in webcam too, and that's on the list to try.

I can see the value of producing resources like this - quick video screencast posts inside of just text, quick training overviews and so on. I'd be really interested in your comments.

Free online screen recorder

What's your website worth? (And why librarians want to know)

Odd question I know, since there are several snap answers - 'What anyone will pay for it', 'Don't care, I'm not selling' and so on. However, some people do like to know this stuff, so there needs to be a way of checking it - even if only vaguely. There are sites that will provide some sort of rough estimate, and it's at this point librarians might want to get interested, if they have to evaluate a site or track down information on it, or see if it's trustworthy. For example, Smart PageRank will check to see how long a site has been running, how many links there are to it, the pagerank and so on. All stuff that is useful to know when evaluating sites. That checker seems to think my site is worth about $1,500.

DNScoop checks with Alexa for the number of visitors to a site, a link to the Internet Archive and inbound links. This resource has decided my site is worth about $23,300.

Cubestat is another site that you might want to use to check out a site.It takes longer to run than the other two and that might be because it broke and stopped working, so alas! I have no idea what my site may be figuratively worth, not that I particularly care. However, when it comes to checking and evaluating sites, it may pay you to think laterally and try out of a few of this type of resource.

Link Worth Calculator - Text Link Ads

Link: Link Worth Calculator - Text Link Ads. This is a splendid little tool. Basically you put in your URL, the category of the page, the number of text links you want to sell, and the position of the link, and this resource comes back and tells you how much you could expect to get for the link. This is worked out by looking at your traffic, inbound links, theme and so on. It's very helpful if you're considering selling links on your site.

Firefox 2.0 Alpha

Link: Revolving World has a link to the download for Firefox 2.0 Alpha. Since it's alpha it's going to break - that's what it's for, so I shan't be downloading it, but it's nice to know that a new version is on its way.

End up dial-up in the UK

Link: BBC NEWS | Technology | Broadband growth speeds forward asks the question 'is this the end of dial-up in the UK?'. Broadband now accounts for 64% of all net connections, according to the ONS.