If you haven’t heard of the JingProject, head over to the site right now.  I’ve been using Jing for several months (since the initial beta) and I use it all the time.

Jing is a free product by TechSmith, the makers of the premier screen capture product Camtasia Studio and screenshot app SnagIt.

Here at my day job I use it to make little How-To videos or document a process.  It’s so much easier for me to just record the steps with Jing and send a link to the video to an end user, colleague or friend than to write out the steps in an email precisely enough for them to follow.  With Jing’s instant publishing integration it takes no time to upload the video to the web and send the link or save it locally as documentation.

Jing does have a 5 minute limit so therefore is only good for quick, informal screen captures.  If you’re wanting to make a longer or more polished video stick with Camtasia.

Here’s a quick lesson on how Jing works and the ideas that spawned it.  Take a look.

With this simple “hack” anyone can go from zero to 500, 5000, 50,000 subscribers in a single day!  Well, at least that’s what your Feedburner badge will say.  It’s quite obvious that you would be able to subscribe to your own feed and inflate your numbers but who’d have thought it could be this easy?

I may have a couple thousand subscribers by tomorrow .

Here’s the original article on TechCrunch.

If you saw my SlideRocket Review post the other day you know that my first impressions were pretty good.  I neglected to mention some of the more powerful features such as PowerPoint import and being ablet to pull in live data from Google Docs & Spreadsheets not to mention the offline client that is coming soon!

Here are some of those processes demo’d by SlideRocket.

Import PowerPoint Slides into SlideRocket

Import Google Spreadsheet Data into SlideRocket

SlideRocket Offline Player

Yesterday there was a Microsoft Ad showing on my site. I captured it in the video below (chances are it’s running on the page today since I’m writing about it).  It’s about their new ad campaign, The Mojave Experiment (I first mentioned Mojave in an earlier post July 25th), which takes people with negative preconceived notions about Windows Vista and lets them test out Microsoft’s new beta operating system Mojave.

The catch is… they are really testing Vista!  The Mojave site has some pretty funny videos with the users bashing Vista then doing a 180 when they get to test Mojave. Microsoft has posted some really interesting before and after survey numbers from the experiment.

• 94% of respondents rated Mojave higher than they initially rated Vista
• 0% rated Mojave lower than initially rated Vista
• Average pre-demo Vista score: 4.4
• Average post-demo Mojave score: 8.5

It’s about time Microsoft is finally attempting to dispel the Vista sucks rumors. I’ve been using Vista for two years now (since beta 2).  Ever since RC1 it’s been pretty good except for some compatibility issues.  Since the RTM release though it’s been solid.

Is it too little, too late?  Can Microsoft turn around the reputation the Mac commercials gave to Vista? We’ll see.

I finally got my SlideRocket Invite last night.  I saw their demo a couple weeks ago.

My first impression after having a bit to play with it is pretty good.  They’re still calling it a “Preview” which is more like an alpha version.  They actually warn you when first logging in that there still may be issues.  It didn’t take me long to see why they have the warning.  Most of the functionality is working correctly but I did experience several glitches when working with the slide components, text and graphics.

The biggest thing I noticed was my laptop fan kicking on very soon after opening a new presentation in edit mode.  Turns out SlideRocket is pretty CPU intensive using up 60% of my Core 2 Duo 2.2Ghz processor and Firefox was consuming double the RAM I’ve seen since upgrading to 3.0.  Firefox was sluggish at times and even froze for over a minute on multiple occasions.

All in all though I’d have to say I’m very impressed so far.  The menus were totally different than traditional presentation software but were pretty intuitive and easy to navigate.  SlideRocket is definitely feature rich especially when compared to PowerPoint and creates much more powerful graphics in a lot less time.

Here’s a little slideshow I threw together showcasing some of the transitions, text effects and things.