« September 2008 | Main | November 2008 »
GAN Conferencing (as they call themselves at cocktail parties) unveiled a new website design today. I'm always happy to highlight developments and news in the web conferencing field, so check it out and feel free to add your opinions, comments, and suggestions here. (By the way, I'm kind of interested in the public take on animated video/imagery on home pages. I don't like it, but that's a personal preference and is not backed up by any studies of effectiveness or general popularity.)
| |
Alltop has broken out web conferencing as its own topic page: http://webconferencing.alltop.com/
It's nice to know that people don't have to guess that my blogs are grouped under Event Planning, as they used to be.
So now you can go to Alltop to skim current articles and blog entries in the web conferencing space. There are still a few web conferencing vendor blogs that Alltop hasn't found, and you can link to them from my blogs resource page: http://wsuccess.typepad.com/webinarblog/detailed-blog-information.html
While you're there you can read yet another impassioned comment decrying the death of the English language signaled by use of the word "Webinar." I feel so powerful!
| |
I just got notified that Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro version 7 is about to get an upgrade (labeled Service Pack 1). Customers who have the software installed on premise should get the service pack on November 3 and customers who use the online hosted service should see the upgrade after November 7.
There are supposedly some bug fixes included (the release guide is not yet available online) and a variety of feature improvements:
(These are obviously aimed at helping limited accessibility users who can't use a mouse)
That last one is the most interesting to me. If you have an account with a maximum meeting room size of 100 people, the minute you hit 100 participants, nobody else can join. The new option lets you pre-purchase blocks of minutes that get drawn on as needed to expand capacity.
Say you buy 5000 overage minutes and put them in your "bank." You run an event and max out your 100-person capacity. You can let additional people join against your banked minutes. The usage is calculated by the amount of time each extra person stays in the meeting. So if one extra attendee participates for 60 minutes, and another extra attendee participates for 45 minutes, you are charged 105 minutes against your bank.
Some of the details are unclear to me... Can an organizer control which meetings allow over-capacity attendance and which don't? What happens if you use up your banked overage minutes in the middle of a webinar? Do all the extra attendees suddenly get booted out of the meeting?
I'm glad to see that Adobe is still making upgrades to their Breeze purchase. It shows that they didn't simply write off the product as an uninteresting part of the Macromedia acquisition. I'm looking forward to seeing what bug fixes get included in this release. I have a few pet priorities, along with some minor usability enhancements that I'm crossing my fingers might have been added without being called out in the advance announcement.
| |
Rich Tehrani is the president and group editor-in-chief of TMCnet. He saw the article I wrote last month about their use of sponsored channels and editorial content and tried to submit a comment. Unfortunately, TypePad rejected his comment as spam before I ever had a chance to see it (possibly because of length and numerous links... Who can tell?). He sent me his comments in an email and I would like to run them in full. Because of the length, I decided to put it as a new entry, rather than a comment to the previous article. Here is Rich's response, unedited and unexpurgated:
-----------------------------------------
Ken,
Thanks for the article -- I am happy you have found your way to TMCnet in the past and have perused some of our content. Since you had questions I decided I would answer them. Channels are sold and promoted as sponsored content areas to companies currently in the communications and technology spaces.
We do not hide the fact these are sponsored areas – in fact we work with channel sponsors to closely meet their artistic/branding needs and their logos and usually 3 advertisements appear on the page with the articles.
Part of the reason companies purchase channels is because they rank very high on search engines – and these are organic links which are extremely valuable.
In terms of objectivity, etc – we don’t instruct our writers to alter their company coverage in any way when writing for a channel. A channel comes with an obligation to cover the company on a frequent basis but we do cover all companies in our spaces and write 150-300 articles a day meaning channel customers do not generally get any special treatment. In fact, our goal is to cover all news in our markets on a daily basis.
When a reader clicks on the channel button which appears on virtually every page of TMCnet, they come to a page which says the following:
I believe this to be self-explanatory.
We do allow channel customers to control the news on their channel and some approve the stories which appear on these sponsored content sites. Still, it is plainly a sponsored page and I firmly believe there is no conflict in this approach. In fact, an article that a channel sponsor does not want to run on their channel will generally end up somewhere else on TMCnet.
We also have a product called a Global Online Community (GOC) which has much more content than a channel and is a richer and more exclusive product. Generally the companies sponsoring GOCs do not put restrictions on what we cover and subsequently a GOC focusing on IP communications will have many articles focusing on the IP communications industry and in most cases will have articles on the sponsor’s competition.
When clicking on the GOC graphic at the top of virtually all TMCnet pages you see the following text:
Again, we cannot be any more transparent in our approach.
As a matter of course we do write articles on webinars in the industry. In fact here is a blog entry I wrote about one of your webinars in April of last year.
In addition, many of the webinars TMC conducts are also written about. Our web readers feel webinars are valuable resources (as evidenced by the over 10,000 people a year who attend them) and this is why you might find an article covering a webinar on a company’s channel. We believe this is a logical place for this content to live and moreover by aggregating company news on a single page, readers have a quick and easy resource to come to when looking for happenings in a market segment and/or a specific company.
Feel free to drop me a line at (rtehrani (at) tmcnet dot com) any time you have additional questions on TMCnet or our parent company TMC. We have about 120 monthly sponsors to our channels and communities and I personally believe these products are going to be a pillar of the web advertising market going forward.
Sincerely,
Rich Tehrani
President
TMC
| |
This week you have a chance to participate in a webinar on boosting interactivity in your web presentations. I will be covering tips on how to use web conferencing features such as chat, polls, survey, and feedback tools -- as well as things you can do with your presentation style alone to better involve and engage your audience. The tips are appropriate for everything from small collaborative sessions to formal training classes to large public webinars. I'll be making distinctions between them.
The webinar is scheduled for Thursday, October 16 at 10am Pacific / 1pm Eastern. I gave this once before and it was a big hit, with all kinds of questions from the audience and high ratings. So if you missed it last time, you have a chance to correct that terrible mistake! :)
The webinar is being given with Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro, and I'll be making use of several innovative features of that package. So it's also a chance to check out the software without having to listen to a sales demo!
Here's the countdown widget from EventSpan:
And if that doesn't show up in your feed reader, you can always go to www.effectivewebinars.com to see the latest and greatest public sessions on my agenda.
I look forward to seeing you on Thursday. Enough reading... Go register.
| |
Comments