Monday May 16, 2005

About screencasts, del.icio.us and thlinking (no typo)
I've been trying to explain the beauty and the benefits of del.icio.us to folks, and want to share a link to Jon Udell's killer screencast that does it so very well.  Udell's screencast is a powerful combination of storytelling and demo.  Worth a few moments - do check it out.

And, if a software service causes someone like James Governor to propose adding a new word to the lexicon ("thlinking"), well, it's worth paying attention to.  In fact, the ability to annotate a bookmark in del.icio.us with a quick one-liner explaining  why you think the link matters and why someone else should care (get it? think + link = thlink) is one of the features I like best - combined with the ability to see how many other people think that bookmark matters and what they've annotated the link with.  James' bottom-line comment in his blog on thlinking:

"What's my point? Insights don't need 100 pages, or even 10 pages, or even one page, to explain. Sometimes you just need to point at something and say why you're doing so."

Back to Udell's screencast. Being of sound mind, I had an epiphany[1] as soon as I saw the screencast - we should be creating screencasts for some of the cool features in Solaris (and OpenSolaris).  Imagine if more people could see the users (or even the authors) of software demo it, complete with their personal stories about why it matters?  To have software demonstrated by someone who truly "gets it" and can help you understand the benefits - well, that's gotta be useful.

It turns out that Jon Udell recently wrote about the value of screencasts here and that Curt Hibbs has also blogged 'Screencasts - A better way to "get" it' as well.  Curt even links to a movie that he suggests had a lot to do with the wildfire spread of Ruby on Rails. And Roman Strobl has already experimented with some audio-tracked flash demo's on his blog here.  The idea is clearly catching on...

I particularly like what Jon says in PrimeTime Hypermedia about how screencasting can empower people who "get" a piece of software:

"It may, however, be obvious how to use a piece of software, and yet not at all obvious why to use it. I'll give you two examples: Wikipedia and del.icio.us. Anyone who approaches either of these applications will immediately grasp their basic modes of use. That's the easy part. The hard part is understanding what they're about, and why they matter."

So - OpenSolaris engineers and fans - I entreat you - make some cool OpenSolaris screencasts, and spread the word.  (And send me links, too!)

[1] Truth be told, the epiphany didn't happen until after I saw the screencast with audio enabled - the audio function is fried on my current Tecra laptop.  :-)

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(2005-05-16 11:36:35.0) Permalink Comments [1]