Honorable Mention - Just off the 2007 List

These free web tools just missed making my Top 12 Tool list for 2007. I use all of them, but not enough (or not seriously enough) for them to work their way into the top 12.

Zentation: allows for a combination of video and PowerPoint, running side-by-side and synchronized by the creator. I think there are good applications for this, but using a boring talking head in the video screen is not my idea of a good application. However, watching a good presenter, such as Guy Kawasaki, can be effective because he has a great stage presence. Embedded below is an attempt I made several months ago to combine a screencast video of Club Penguin with my son as the tour director, combined with some PPT slides and web pages screenshots (link to Zentation site).



Splashcast: allows for a combination of various media in a single screen. Using Splashcast you can mix together any combination of video, music, photos, narration, text, RSS feeds, PowerPoint presentations and PDF documents. You can create a "channel" which will basically create a table of contents of all your presentations that can be easily embedded and played on any web site, blog, or social network page. The most recent Splashcast will be at the top of the list ready for play, but a viewer can easily begin playing one of the older episodes, if desired.

Scribd: is a document sharing site that allows comments, ratings, and the like. Upload a doument and you can then convert it to many different formats, including Word, PDF, plain text, HTML, JPEG, PowerPoint, Excel, Postscript, LIT, and even convert text into an mp3 for audio playback. They use a custom Flash document viewer that lets you display documents right in your Web browser. My use of this service seems to go in spurts. Maybe 2008 will be their year. Here is a link to the document of mine on Scribd that has been most viewed (almost 4000 views): New Editing Tools in Picnik Photo Editor

Protopage: I've used this as a presentation tool and liked it. Just haven't been able to spend enough quality time with this to put it on the list (yet).

Animoto: This site let's you mix together your photos and their music to create a free 30-second music video, or pay $3 for a longer one. Here is one of my free efforts.

Vyew: this is a free web conferencing tool that I have used a couple of times and it seemed to work well. I haven;t used it extensively enough to know for sure how well it scales as the number of participants increases.