Dvir Reznik | The (old) Blog

Posted via email from Dvir’s posterous

Excellent news: Gia Lyons, IBM’s social software evangelist has opened an external blog, titled Connected (same as her internal one).

Gia is responsible for spreading the word of enterprise social software and networking in Americas, particularly Lotus Connections and other social tools IBMers use internally.
Her external blog is quite new, but she already pre-populated it with some of her internal ‘greatest hits’, such as The Nature of Males and The Connected Age. Recommended reading !

Gia, welcome !

Connected, by Gia Lyons.

In a lecture I gave a while back I stated some facts about YouTube!, from its official stats. As it turns out, there are 100 million (!) videos watched, every day! and roughly 65,000 videos are uploaded every day. But strikes me the most is the fact that the average user spends 17 minutes at youtube.com. 17 minutes. We’re talking of a website that has only videos, most of them under 5 mins.
The first response from the people who heard that was “how they find the time?” “don’t they have work to do”? As one of the people spending several minutes at YouTube I think that it’s all part of our work. Taking those 5-10 minute break, laugh a little, explore what the world created (Time Magazine POY) – is also working.

With that in mind, I was ‘working’ in YouTube the other day and came across this commercial. I work with advertising agencies a bit, and I know a good commercial when I see one, and this is a good commercial. I agree that the commercial sucks. I would probably find 20 other scenarios to advertise that Flea Market, if I were asked to. But this is a good commercial because it created a buzz. And in the world we live in, web 2.0, creating that buzz is the real thing.

The video was watched 210,000 times (when I wrote this), and most important – over 330 comments. Creating a buzz, remember?

And now you can watch it, and let me know what you think.

RSS subs: click here if you can’t see the video.

This is the first post I’m writing using Microsoft Windows Live Writer (Beta). I’ve seen a post somewhere in the blogosphere (sorry, can’t remember where), and I’ve been trying to use it ever since. After some firewall issues, it finally connected to my blog.

My 1st impression is wow. Very intuitive, easy to use design, the GUI is very Office-like, and editing/creating posts has never been easier.

A very simple wizard lets you connect to either Windows Live Blogging service or a bunch of other blogging services, including Blogger (which I use).

Just enter your blog url, username and pass, and you’re there.. So far, compared with the online version of writing in my blog, it’s a hugh difference. Like writing a Word doc.

I still have to play with it a bit, but it looks good.

The only issue so far is with images. You have to create a FTP connection to upload images, or host them in one of the free hosting services online, and paste the image link (which I did). But if you already have a blog, I’m guessing you have a FTP available, so that’s not a big problem…

Here’s a screenshot of this post, from Live Writer: