Happy Holidays

As I was thinking about ways to wish my colleagues and online friends a happy holiday, I thought of how, at home, we traditionally send Christmas cards and a photo of the kids, and sometimes, a letter.

Most of the cards are mailed to people we don't see very often. We also love getting cards, letters, and photos of our friends. It simply is a way to stay in touch with people we see way too little.

Online greetings
I have often described relationships, partnerships, and the learning process in the online environment are much like those processes and relationships in the physical office and learning environments. The processes online mimic the processes we have in-person.

My question became how do I send holiday greetings to those I know mostly online? Most of my online friends, I have met at conferences and see once, maybe twice, a year. However, through twitter, blogging, and even social bookmarking, I know these acquaintances much better.

What is an appropriate online holiday wish "card"? Facebook offers ways to send holiday wishes through wall posts; I certainly enjoy getting holiday wishes on my wall in Facebook.


For my online holiday greetings, I wanted my contacts in Facebook, Twitter, as well as others, to receive the greeting. I also wanted to utilize online technologies that enable expressions in ways beyond text and a single photo graph.

Blending family, work, and online activities
While there is a clear distinction between my family and professional life, there are also many reasons and ways to blend the two. Discussions at home about work and discussions at work about home help build respect and understanding among those we work with and those we live with.

Video
I began the process of creating a video when I tweeted I was looking for Christmas music to embed in a animoto video, but having trouble finding music I could distribute. Daniel Maher of Yorkshire, UK, responded by sending his version Silent Night and Dreaming of a White Christmas on a mp3 file. Many Thanks Danny!

Note: the lesson learned is that Twitter works! I have never personally met Danny, but because of a few previous Twitter conversations, he offered his help. He contacted me through Facebook and then sent me the file through email. These systems that generate weak ties help create products and ideas, I have no doubt.

Among the season's celebrations and worship, this time of the year is also a time of reflection--a time to think about events, accomplishments, contacts, and learning that occurred throughout the year. The video is a summary of events, including family, work, and online activities. Although most of the images will mean nothing to you, you will recognize a few from my phatic Twitter posts or from the conferences we attended.

May you have a joyous holiday season and best of year ever!



Photos, images, and ideas for the video were provided by: Anne Adrian, Kelly Adrian, Mark Bransby, Deb Coates, Floyd Davenport, Jonathan Davis, Kevin Gamble, Virginia Morgan, Greg Parmer, Ann Beth Presley, Rusty Presley, Scott Snyder, James Robinson, and Jason Young. In addition to family events, ACE / NETC and Red Imported Fire Ant conferences are highlighted.

Animoto: New way to present photos

Aminoto (beta) is a cool web application that automatically generates videos from images and music.

Upload your own images or retrieve them from Facebook, Smugmug, Picasa, and Photobucket.

Add your own embed music from the Aminoto's selection or use your own.

The 30 second version is free, but the longer version current costs $3 or you can get unlimited access for $30 per year.

Possible uses of aminoto are:

• showing activities during anual reports to local funding agencies.
• summarizing a season or year for a group.
• setting the stage in an opening of a meeting by using an upbeat video.
• creating video scrapbook.

According to the animoto site, future plans are to:

• provide additional user control over speed in the near future.
• user control over the photo.
• allow downloading of the videos.
• add text to videos (currently to add text you should edit the photos in a photo editor to create a photo with text).

Why does animoto charge?

The main reason we charge has to do with the intensity of our video production process. In order to be able to offer something different from what's out there on the web, namely the type of "high-end" motion design and effects used in TV & film, we actually have to produce from scratch EACH new frame of your Animoto video... and there are 24 frames in each second of video! As you can imagine, this takes massive amounts of processor power, so we unfortunately can't afford to give everything away for free, particularly full-length videos, which really have intense demands on our render system. Fun fact: did you know it takes Pixar Studios 408 hours to render each second of their films using 3000 computers? Makes what we're doing here at Animoto seem pretty whimpy.

For demonstration, I used a set of photos taken from a trip that members of the Alabama Agricultural County Agents and Specialist Association made to help a few citizens in Hancock County, Mississippi one year after Katrina (September 2006). The story behind the video can be found at http://www.aafromaa.com/Katrina.htm .