This morning I spotted a couple of tools that I thought I should try and I’m glad I did because I quite like them both, although with some reservations. The two services are Amplify & Jing. Watch this video created with Jing for a brief intro to both. (Sorry, WordPress won’t let me embed, so click the image!)
Jing is a free service from techsmith.com, the makers of the popular screen capture software Camtasia. Capturing and publishing are pretty straightforward, once you know how – I did struggle to find things initially! The free service (not suprisingly I guess) restricts your storage (2GB) and your monthly bandwidth (how much you upload, also 2GB) so there are limits. The above 2-min recording used up 7.5MB of my allowance (not quite 1%). I will definitely be using it again for videoing and will be interested to see whether storage becomes an issue. For images I imagine I’ll stick with my long time friend MWSnap
Amplify uses the WordPress blogging platform and is a spin-off from Clipmarks. On the whole it worked well for me, although it can be a bit fiddly clipping the bit you want, especially if there is a link involved – it’s easy to click the link rather than clip the link!! The blogging side of it was great (it’s wordpress!) and it’s very easy to tweet what you clog… oh dear. I used my Amplify Clip Blog today to create a collection of posts on e-Learning coverage on various HEA Subject Centres that are relevant to the LSE. I don’t think I’ll be using Amplify again as a personal tool (except to review today’s work!) but I can see it could make a great tool for a digital literacy or other teaching activity. For now, I’ll be sticking with Diigo / Delicious and my memory of what I liked on the page!
Both worth some of your time.
Hi Matt, thanks for trying out Amplify and the review!
We’re still working hard on making Amplify great, so getting feedback like this is very helpful. One question I’ve got for you if you don’t mind… We’ve got a sync option that lets you post links to the source URLs of what you clip to Delicious, so you can clip the bit you want & share that with friends and followers, but also keep your existing collection of bookmarks where it is and add to that using Amplify.
Would syncing that make you more likely to keep using Amplify? If so, should we present the option differently during the setup process?
Thanks again!
-Eric Skiff
Amplify Developer
@Eric I think syncing and integrations between all of these social technology services are incredibly important. I was pleased to see both the Twitter & Delicious connections. At the end of the day I’m not sure being able to clip items on a page is enough of a draw for me to change how I bookmark & reflect on what I find on the net. For info – I currently bookmark with Diigo which simultaneously bookmarks to Delicious (where I tend to retrieve from) because it gives me the option to Tweet the bookmark & create organised playlists of bookmarks.