Blogger – Page 2 – Just thoughts

Creating a shared Spotify Playlist that I can blog about has taken me much longer than I ever expected or hoped it would. I’ve had to learn a fair bit about sharing music, which I didn’t know anything about, and even more about what you can do with Spotify and how it can be made to work with iTunes. A certain sense of satisfaction at having got it to work, but I’d be the first to say that “there must be a better way” and if anyone can suggest it, I’d be grateful.

You start off with the service that does just what you want it to – create a Playlist and then Share it with whosoever you want to share it with, be it Public, or Limited. That’s fine … there’s a bit of a setback when you realise there’s not an easy way of importing the actual Playlist into a blog, so you have to go back to iTunes (where you created it, before importing the track list into Spotify) and saving that Playlist as a text file. This you then have to edit substantially to get any text for the Blogpost.

Then, the major setback, you find that not all the tracks on the playlist are recognised by Spotify; they are played because Spotify plays them as Local Files, but to get the best experience you then have to go through the ones that don’t have a Spotify existence and find the track manually on Spotify itself. This may be because it’s just got a slightly different name to the track on your Playlist. Bother! That will still leave some that don’t appear on Spotify at all – my opera tracks are a good example. As I said before, they play because they play as Local Files, but that won’t do if you want to create a Blogpost that references ALL the tracks on the Playlist.

So you have to create a Shared Folder that you point your readership to and ask them to download the tracks into their own Local Files folder in Spotify – which they will have have had to install on their local machine; would they bother, I think not.

Having done all of that – which is a lot of work to just read a Blogpost – it does work; but it’s not worth the effort for the Writer or the potential Reader, I’m afraid. The best solution is to “forget” about the missing files, just put it down to “c’est la vie”, share the Playlist on tumblr and enjoy the music. Perhaps reading the Blogpost alongside the tumblr stream playing in the background 🙂

I wrote this some time ago, but never published it, perhaps I knew what was in the pipeline. There will be a sequel … that’s a promise. Here’s the problem (ie the user requirement).

I want to create a family blog for family members of very mixed IT ability and inclination. They are (believe it or not) NOT IT-geeks. I’ve tried several ways of engaging with them, emploring to comment upon blog posts, allowing the authorship to a shared private blog – so that they don’t need to set their own up. Put loads of “useful” information up, including commentary on family photos stored and linked to on Picasa, but to no avail. How can I increase the engagement with this activity? [Please don’t ask the question … “is this a desirable activity?” … that’s not allowed!]

It would appear that video (of grandchildren, of distant parents) is a hook. Is something that wakes them up to the value of social media. But how do you share videos on the internet and keep them private?

You need a video-serving solution, there’s several to choose from – YouTube, viddler or vimeo for instance – but you need to be able to keep the video private, to be shared to just a group of people (your family). After looking at YouTube, decided to experiment with viddler. The upload is fast, as is the encoding and the quality of streaming is good. You can set the default upload save to be private and then share it afterwards – if you want to. However, if you want to embed the video on your blog, you can’t unless you make the video public! In the end I plumped for Vimeo Plus – paying a subscription for the level of privacy I wanted with the ability to embed videos which run on mobile devices (including iOS) as well.

Then there’s Posterous, a really easy to use blogging service that even your granny could use (if they are on email that is). Set yourself (and all your other family members) up with an account(s) on Posterous and you have a way of sharing each others’ videos privately. PLUS, if you install the browser button “Share on Posterous” with Firefox, you can then go to your viddler or vimeo video and using the button, embed it in a Posterous blog post. If as a family you agree to use the same password for your Posterous blogs you can then watch and share securely.

All that’s needed for the serious (or should it be serial) blogger like me is to setup the links to the Posterous video-blogs on your private blog (ie Blogger or WordPress) and you have an integrated solution. Indeed, it might even be possible to send the embedded video from Posterous to your Blogger/Wordpress private blog as it has an interface that posts out to other social media applications as well as accepting in by simple email.

So, give Posterous a look for your “family blog” even if you aren’t interested in videos.