How to make a free phone call using Google account

A wonderful feature that comes with Gmail accounts is the ability to make free phone calls (I don't know how this applies outside of the USA, but within the USA you can make free phone calls within the USA). This feature comes with both personal gmail accounts and academic accounts (e.g. University of MN gmail).

I created a short video to show how to make a phone call from my gmail account to show you how to do this:

Using UMConnect (Adobe Connect) from iPad and IPhone

I just came from a meeting where we connected with a colleague in Ireland using Adobe Connect on the iPad, and the quality was excellent! (audio, video and text). Here's a photo I took of the iPad showing what the session looks like on the iPad. This opens up all kinds of possibilities...

Uploading Video to Blog

My students have been working on their blogs, experimenting with different uses for their blogs, and trying to upload different kinds of files. What is interesting is that Blogger enables you to upload video, but not audio files. Here I have uploaded a video that I took at the UMD Take a Stand Rally. I am checking to see if this works. I recorded this video as  Quick Time video using my Canon Power Shot digital camera (just a little point and shoot). It is 18 seconds long, and is 24 MB. 

A mistake people sometimes make when uploading video to blogger is missing the step, once you have uploaded the video, to click on the blue "add selected" button to add the video that you have uploaded to the blog entry, as shown in this screen shot below:

Once you do this, the video is added to the blog. Then the last step is to make sure that you post the blog entry to your blog:)

Update on posting audio file - by using link to Google Doc

I'm still working on ways to upload audio files as part of my blog. As I noted in my previous entry, this worked great using my Posterous blog, but isn't as easy in Blogger, as Blogger doesn't allow you to upload an audio file. To get around this, what I have done is:

1. Upload the audio file into my Google Docs account
2. I made sure to change the share settings for the file in Google Docs so that it is set to be visible to anyone who has the link
3. Then I copied the link from Google Docs
4. Here in my Blogger blog I can share the link. If you click on this link it will take you to my Google Docs

This isn't a great option as in my experience the more steps you require of an end user to be able to access something you share with them online, the less likely they are to follow through and access it. If it works simply, quickly, intuitively with one click, and if it doesn't require actually downloading anything (i.e. users can view online, rather than downloading audio file, pdf or other file), then it increases the likelihood that people will access the file.

I did find some guidelines about audio files in Blogger, and it seems that they are advocating variations of what I describe above. Here are some guidelines about this:

• Posting music/audio 
• A consuming experience. This describes a much more complicated approach where you combine the audio with a stationary screen shot to make a video, and then upload this video into blogger (why Blogger allows you to upload video and not audio beats me!).  While this is a clever idea to use this workaround, it's really a lot more work to do and may put off a lot of folks (like me!) who want a quick and easy way to upload audio files.

My evolving thoughts on this: 

• If I wanted to use my blog to share a lot of audio files, then I might consider using Posterous rather than Blogger as my blog too because if the ease of uploading audio files. 
• Another thing that I also prefer about Posterous is that I can sign into it using more than one email. This is important since I currently have to use my personal gmail account for my Blogger blog rather than my education gmail, and use separate browsers for each, because of the security restrictions on the education account. But, for now, since this tech blog is in Blogger, I'll stay here -- at least for a while!

Posting Audio File to Blog

I've been playing around with audio file sharing via blogs, and found that this is easy to do on a Posterous blog, but not in Blogger. To do this in Posterous what I did was:
1. Use my iPhone Voice Memo app to record a voice recording on my phone
2. From within the app I chose the option to share the recording by emailing it, do I emailed it to my my Posterous blog (as that's an option for how to post in Posterous). I also included the text content of the blog as the email message.

It worked! Check it out:
http://hrallis.posterous.com/testing-to-see-if-i-can-upload-voice-recordin