What’s in a name? The G+ question.

Though I hate to bring up the pseudonym argument again, this post is about my own personal reasons for wanting to use my pseudonym on Google+ and why I feel that pseudonyms should be allowed. I have thought about the whole argument for a long time, since joining Google+ as a matter of fact. I’ve been on Google+ since the very beginning and I joined as Technogran, my online name and the name that just about everyone knows me by. I have used that name since first buying a computer all those years ago and my reasons for wishing to use a pseudonym are varied and I won’t bore you by going into them in detail here. As far as I’m concerned my reasons for using my pseudonym hinge on the way that Google+ differs in its intended usage as a social network from for example Facebook, which is its closest equivalent.

Facebook began as a means of socialising in college and keeping in touch. I should imagine its first initial remit was usability by students who either knew one another personally or if not, were in fairly close proximity to one another and therefore could in theory meet up at say a coffee house etc. In other words, its aim was a user base of a fairly close nature as its users would all be students. Now of course it has a user base which is world wide, but how do the majority of us tend to use Facebook now? In my case most of those I share with on Facebook are either family or friends who know me personally and who I can meet face to face any day of the week. The same is true for them also. I know where they live and they know where I live. We might not see each other for months at a time or we might see each other every week, but we all know one another personally.  Although I would have loved to also use Technogran on Facebook, I am not so bothered about using my real name on there as the public never see it because my posts on there are for my family and friends only.

Now in contrast, let’s look at how Google+ got off the ground. Google invited lot’s of technically minded and corporate users to the beta of Google+. These people were chosen by Google for a reason. They wanted feedback of course, but I also believe that they did not want or intend that Google+ be a Facebook clone. By selecting a certain type of user such as technology bloggers and journalists, corporate users, professional photographers and those who work in the technology field, they automatically set the tone for how Google + tends to still be used by everyone today, for mainly serious discussion with like minded individuals who share the same interests.  For me as a self confessed geek,  its has been a wonderful and enlightening experience and I  have learned so much from the countless users who are so expert in their own chosen fields of expertise. But, the big question is, do I KNOW any of these people personally?

The chances of me bumping into (for example) Robert Scoble down at my local pub, or seeing Louis Gray in my local Tesco’s and having a friendly chat with either of them is about as likely as this Granny going to Mars. I knew OF them before the birth of Google+ simply because I’m such a Geek and into technology myself. I know of other technology journalists and bloggers as well by name because I read their articles about subjects that interest me.  It’s one of the main reasons why I begged for an invite and once on G+ felt so at home. But I don’t know any of them personally.  I could recognise them if they passed me in the street because I’ve seen photos and watched videos of them on the internet or in other social sites that they are part of. But knowing OF someone is not the same as KNOWING them. They probably also know me. I’ve maybe commented on their blog posts or joined in a discussion on other sites as Technogran in the past.

So THAT is the big difference between Facebook and Google+ and one of my main reasons for wanting to be allowed to use my pseudonym on there. There is also another reason,  the way that Google+ works. If I post and make it public then anyone can read that post and if they are on Google+ they can add me to one of their circles WITHOUT MY PERMISSION.  I am well aware that the simple answer to that is don’t post to Public. But is that how Google really want us to use Google+?  I could also call myself by my real name (which incidentally is not the one I was born with as that changed once I  married) and then only have two circles, one for family and one for personal friends and only post to those two circles. However in doing so,  I would be essentially cloning my Facebook usage and so there would be no real reason that I can think of to be on Google+! Besides which I don’t think for one moment that Vic Gundotra and the Google+ team intend us to use Google+ in the same way as any of us tend to use Facebook. The posts I usually make on Google+ are of little or no interest to my family and friends. I know this because I do sometimes post on there with the odd link or some other interest on Facebook and I never get any response whatsoever whereas those in my Google+ circles are usually very interested. In other words, its a whole different audience on Google+. 

So, its horses for courses as the saying goes, and on Google+ where none of my audience know me personally and never will, and where by the same token I don’t know them either, I prefer NOT to use my real name but to be able to call myself Technogran which is the name I am commonly known by on the internet. Don’t believe me? Just Google it!

TG

My new Mobile. Using the Nokia Lumia 800 Windows phone.

Last year I finally tried out an iPhone. It was the first time that I had used a so called ‘smart phone’ and I suppose I was late to try one compared to the rest of the world, but I couldn’t quite see how I needed to use one. Was it important for me to be able to take a picture when travelling about and then immediately share it with my social networks? Or let my online friends know where I was at any particular moment in time? All I seemed to be using a mobile for was calls and messages. I have enjoyed using the iPhone, but I didn’t feel the need to download all that many applications to it, nor did I feel that I had to have it constantly by my side all the time.  I didn’t feel the need to use most of its features apart from receiving/making calls or texting my family and friends. At the end of last year, I decided to upgrade to a Nokia Lumia 800 Windows phone and for me, its the best thing I have ever done.

Google+. From a Granny’s point of view.

For the last few days, I’ve been trying out Google+, the new social network to arrive on the scene from Google. What, another one? I hear most of you cry, but I for one love it, in fact I haven’t been able to keep off there since I received the invite!  Some of my readers may be aware that I have never been a fan of Facebook, I only began using it because members of my family asked me to join. Google+ is far more to my taste, from it’s brilliantly conceived circles that allow you to keep everyone separate so that you can just post an update to those you choose, to its fantastic integration of Picasa and your photos. Oh, and don’t of course forget Blogger!

How I make use of Photo Fuse in Windows Live Photo Gallery.

During our recent day out in York I wanted to take a photo of a very attractive building, but there were so many people walking in front of this particular building, I simply couldn’t get a clear shot of it. The answer is to take quite a few shots from exactly the same spot so that you can ‘fix’ it and remove all of the people using Photo Fuse in Windows Live Photo Gallery. Of course, the original intention of Photo Fuse was to arrive at a perfect ‘Group’ shot of people, but I find Photo Fuse far more useful when I wish to take a shot of something and I can’t get a clear shot without including people walking past. Here is my step by step ‘how-to’ showing you just how to remove any unwanted portion of your photos and arrive at your perfect shot.

The Trouble with Microsoft.

As a purely ordinary PC user, i.e not a corporate or business user, I thought that I would put my views forward as to why Microsoft has missed the boat somewhat and allowed others to pass them by in the ‘keeping up with trends’ race. First of all, I feel that every corporation or manufacturer, in whatever area they are, needs competition. Without competition, you would simply stagnate, there would be no one to ‘keep you on your toes’ to encourage you to be innovative or imaginative. You would tend to sit on your laurels because you would be the only one available to your customers, and they in turn would have no other avenue to compare your products with. There would simply be no incentive to improve.

Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, if you had the market all to yourself, you would have little need to listen to feedback from your customers, what they would like in the way of improvements, the future avenues they would find useful, so feedback would not be as important either, you could just move in any direction that you as a business felt was right or suited you. Which users feedback should you listen to as a huge business anyway? The one’s who make you the most profit? Or have done in the past? In Microsoft’s case, this has tended to be the corporate user simply because they were the ‘cash cows’ as they were the largest PC users, and also needed Microsoft’s Office Suite.

The ‘none corporate’ user were in the minority, not a lot of none corporate users owned their own computer in the past, but now things have changed. Slowly over time, we the ‘ordinary’ none corporate user have grown in number, we own PC’s, laptops, iPads, smart phones, and our needs and wants are no where near the same as the corporate user. We want to share, form communities, make friends online, share stories, photos, communicate, and be able to sync instantly our files and photos across our devices without hassle, as long as we have okayed that sync.

Because Microsoft was listening to the wrong audience, they have allowed themselves to lag behind the likes of Google, Apple and Facebook, who haven’t been as concerned about concentrating their listening to the feedback from their corporate users. Today technology has a different set of users, still growing in number, whilst the corporate user, at least in my neck of the woods, is still stagnating and falling behind by still using Windows XP as their operating system, probably because of the cost of re-training their workforce to use a new version of Windows. In fact, I would imagine that there are more none corporate users who have made the leap to Windows 7, and will do the same with Windows 8. It could also be the same story with MS Office as well, but as I am not party to sales this is only a guess on my part.

So where does all the money come from now? The large corporate user, or the ever growing number of ‘ordinary’ users? If you are only looking and listening in one direction, you miss the ability to listen to the requests from the other direction, and can end up lagging so far behind, that it’s going to be hard going to keep up.

(I’m only a Granny, and this post is my personal view of why I think Microsoft need to take a long hard look at who’s feedback they take notice of.)

TG

Creating a Header using Windows Live Photo Gallery

If your blogs theme allows you to use your own header, its nice to be able to use one of your favourite Vistas or scenes so that you can really make your blog really personal to you. Whether you use WordPress or Blogger, here’s how to make a fantastic header using the panoramic feature available in Windows Live Photo Gallery. You don’t need an expensive camera either, so here’s the step by step way to make that favourite scene or spot feature as a header on your blog.

1. Download Windows Live Photo Gallery from  http://explore.live.com/windows-live-photo-gallery?os=other and install on your computer.

2. Now you need to go and take your pictures of your favourite vista or view. You will need to take your shots of the scene from either left or right, and slowly swing your camera horizontally along the entire scene from one side to the other taking your individual shots. Try to keep the camera on the same plane as you pan either left or right. Each shot should overlap each other so that Photo Gallery can ‘stitch’ them all together. See the separate shots below and how they overlap one another as I took them.

3. Next we need to make our Panorama inside Photo Gallery, so select all three (or however many shots you took of your chosen vista) and then click on the Create tab from the ribbon in Photo Gallery.

4. From the Create ribbon, choose the Panorama icon and Photo Gallery will then begin to ‘stitch’ the individual photo together into a panoramic shot.  Once completed it will ask you to give the panorama a name and then you can click on Save.

5. It’s highly likely that your newly created panoramic shot will need cropping, so click on the Crop icon in the ribbon and then crop out all of the black excess from the panoramic shot. When you are certain that all of the black has been cropped out, click on Crop once more to tidy up your shot.

6. Now that our panoramic shot is complete, we can use it on WordPress or Blogger as our header. I’ll deal with WordPress first. Go to your WordPress Dashboard and click on Appearance and then Header from the left hand Menu list.

7. Next you will need to upload your panoramic photo so click on Choose File and then navigate to your panoramic shot and select it, then click on Upload. As it will probably be a large file it may take some time to upload.

8. Once uploaded, you may have to do some more cropping of the panoramic shot depending on the width of the header that your theme uses, then once you are happy with your final crop, click on Crop and Publish.

9. Now go to your blog by clicking on Visit your Site and admire  your new personal header!

10. Now let’s use our panoramic shot as a header on Blogger. Go to your Blogger Dashboard and select Design, then click on Edit in your current Header.

11. Next, from the window that opened click on From your computer and then Choose File.  If you want your blog Title to still be shown, then also select Behind Title and Description from the list. It’s also a good idea to tick Shrink to Fit so that the header fits into your chosen theme.

12. Once your new header has uploaded click on Save. Now you can go and view your newly created header on your blog!

TG

Keeping up with your friends blog posts.

We all like to keep tabs on all of our friends blogs and to be able to read their latest posts as soon as they are published. However, this can often mean trawling around blogging sites, or in the case of WordPress, subscribing to them and then keeping up with reading all of our subscriptions.  Wouldn’t it be wonderful if every time a friend published a new post to their blog we could not only be informed but read it straight away on our computers?  Well you can do exactly that! Without leaving your desktop, you can see all of your friends blog updates and read their posts just as if you were online! Here’s how.

My 2010 year in blogging

Courtesy of the WordPress Team!

Happy New Year from WordPress.com! To kick off the year, we’d like to share with you data on how your blog has been doing. Here’s a high level summary of your overall blog health:

Wow

Blog-Health-o-Meter™

We think you did great!

Crunchy numbers

The average container ship can carry about 4,500 containers. This blog was viewed about 24,000 times in 2010. If each view were a shipping container, your blog would have filled about 5 fully loaded ships.

In 2010, you wrote 76 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 90 posts.

Your busiest day of the year was September 16th with 896 views. The most popular post that day was Problems with your Hotmail upgrade?.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were digitalspy.co.uk, en.blog.wordpress.com, avforums.com, mail.live.com, and windowslive.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for technogran, hate ribbon interface windows 7, gufsdtr500hd review, scotland windows 7 theme, and hotmail problems august 2010.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010. You can see all of the year’s most-viewed posts and pages in your Site Stats.

1

Problems with your Hotmail upgrade? August 2010
19 comments

2

Grundig GUFSDTR500HD Freesat DTR review. January 2010
21 comments

3

Moving your Photo Albums over from Windows Live To WordPress. September 2010
39 comments and 9 Likes on WordPress.com

4

Windows Live Essentials 2011. Live Photo Gallery. November 2010
101 comments and 1 Like on WordPress.com,

5

Who Am I?
23 comments

Share these stats with your visitors

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Post this summary to my blog

See you in 2011!

If you liked what you saw in this summary and want to know more about how your blog is doing, you can always visit your Site Stats, where our helper-monkeys are working day and night to provide you with pages and pages of detail on how your blog is doing.

If you have any feedback on this email, please click here for a very short survey (in English). We would love to hear from you.

Thanks for flying with WordPress.com in 2010.
We look forward to serving you again in 2011! Happy New Year!

Andy, Joen, Martin, Zé, and Automattic

TG  Wishing all my readers a very Happy and Prosperous New Year and don’t forget! Keep Blogging!

Windows Live Writer, Dual postings.

One if the big advantages of using Windows Live Writer to publish your blogs posts is if you have more than one blog and each is on different blogging platforms. I am in this position, I have two blogs on WordPress.com and also two on Blogger. Windows Live Writer allows me to send the same post to both at the same time, so I can do a ‘double’ posting to each one. In this post, I will be showing you how to do this, step by step.  Firstly you will need to set up both your WordPress.com blog in Live Writer and also your Blogger blog. For this how to, I’m going to use my Photo blogs in order to demonstrate how to set them up in Writer and then how to publish the exact same post to both of them.

Windows Live Essentials 2011. Windows Live Writer.

Of all the programs included in the Windows Live Essentials suite, Live Writer was probably the most obvious one to benefit from the use of the ribbon interface. Before this update, it was amazing just how many had been using Live Writer for their blogs and were not aware of many of the features contained within it. To give one example many users did not realise they could add a watermark to their photos from within Writer or alter their photos by applying different effects. These features were all tucked away out of sight under the ‘Advanced’ area in the sidebar originally, but now that they are offered to the user in easy to see icons across the ribbon when they click on a picture or photo, they are constantly visible and only one click away to access.