CyberKen

A committee in my church’s regional body, New Castle Presbytery, asked me to do a study of the annual cost of driving to meetings.  At fifty cents per mile the cost amounted to $39 per person per meeting, or about $36,000 annually for the whole presbytery, a figure we understandably want to reduce!

Teleconferencing is an obvious remedy, but what kind of teleconferencing?  Our presbytery stretches over Delaware and the Eastern Shore of Maryland.  Not all residents in that region have access to broadband, so certain high tech solutions are ruled out from the outset.  And then, there is the average user’s skill level to consider, which is not very high.  Many of our members are seniors, whose familiarity with computers lags behind that of younger people.  We didn’t want a solution that would require installing new software, or fiddling with hardware settings either.  We wanted a solution that would be within the reach of our average user, who may already have taken part in a telephone conference call, and who has a rudimentary competency viewing Web pages with a browser.

We settled on conducting Web conferences by using Google Docs so that the participants can view static but editable visuals in the form of Word documents or Excel spreadsheets, published to Web pages.  And, instead of paying for a telephone company to set up our audio conferences, we decided to use one of the many low cost internet conferencing services, FreeConference.com, where you set up the meeting yourself.

Why FreeConference.com?  Well, in part because they are used by even large companies to save money, and we figured the big players must know a good deal when they see one.  And also because FreeConference.com offers a FaceBook plug-in that makes it really easy to arrange a conference call.  Many of our members are already on FaceBook, so that was a resource that didn’t require more learning.

FreeConference.com conferences are not totally free, of course.  The "free" applies just to the lack of an administrative charge.  Each caller pays his or her long distance phone rates for the connection, which can be made by land line, cell phone, or a VOIP device, in which latter case the connection may indeed be free.  Although smaller groups in our presbytery (with ten or so members) have used Skype (a VOIP service) for audio conferencing quite satisfactorily, we decided not to prescribe Skype as a solution for the whole presbytery because:

• Using Skype still requires learning some skills which our average user might not have the patience or courage to acquire.
• Some of our members have PC’s or connections not up to handling even audio connections on Skype let alone video ones.

Therefore, we settled for a combination of an old, familiar technology, the telephone, paired with a a modern but not-too-demanding one, the internet, for viewing and editing static pages, which even dial-up users can manage.

And, for the member who has no computer, or who is computer-phobic, he or she can still participate in the telephone conference, though the Web conferencing feature of editing conference documents in real time will not be available, because he or she must rely on paper visuals received beforehand via the mail.

All in all this combination of Google Docs and FreeConference.com seems a good practical solution to a not-just-technical challenge.  I’ll let you know after some field testing how it’s working out for us.

Here are five steps for setting up your first Web Conference using this combo:

1.  Have everyone who will meet register with Google.com.  You will use a free feature of Google membership, Google Docs, to share visuals for the meeting, such as Word documents and spreadsheets.  If you do not have a computer, that’s O.K. The convener can send you paper documents for the meeting by mail.  You won’t be able to edit these visuals as the meeting progresses, but at least you will have something in front of you as you follow along.

2.  Have the convener open a a free account at http://www.freeconference.com and follow the instructions there for inviting attenders to call a designated telephone number at an agreed-upon time, and then enter the conference by touch-tone dialing a given code, which the convener will convey ahead of time by email or telephone. A nice feature of FreeConference.com is that it offers a FaceBook plug-in, which makes inviting members to a meeting very easy.  However, one doesn’t need to belong to Facebook to participate in a FreeConference.com conference.  Also, please note:  Attenders can use any manner of telephone connection:  land line, cell phone, or an internet phone connection such as Skype.  There are no administrative charges for FreeConference.com conference calls.  Connection charges are paid by each attender, at whatever long distance rates he/she customarily pays. Using a landline–these days perhaps the most expensive long distance connection–my customary expense is still only $6.00 for a one hour meeting.

3.  The convener will prepare ahead of time whatever visuals will be needed for the meeting.  He/she will place these documents in his/her Google Docs library, and under the "share" link, will then publish each one to the Web.

4.  In his/her Google Docs section, accessible from a top link in on the Gmail Inbox page, the convener will give permission ahead of time for each attender to edit the documents to be shared.  Permissions are set in Google Docs by clicking the "Share" button at the top right corner, then selecting "Sharing permissions". 

5.  The convener will make a list of all the urls (Web addresses) of these documents, and will send out to all attenders an agenda in which links to these urls appear.  During the meeting attenders will be able to see any document by clicking on its link in that email note.  Having been given permission to edit, attenders will be able to make changes to any of the meeting documents. All can see these changes immediately by clicking on the refresh button of their Web browsers.  (Note:  The convener should courteously "control traffic" so that only one attender edits at a time.  The Web software will get confused if two attenders try to edit simultaneously.)

Friends sometimes compliment a photo that has captured a decisive moment, I suppose because they think that my reaction time was extraordinary.  What they may not realize is that reaction time has little to do with capturing just the right  moment in photography.  What counts—I learned this from reading about Cartier Bresson– is anticipating an event that is about to unfold, noticing something in the offing, and being ready when it comes.

Out of the corner of my eye (the one aware of action outside the finder as I peer through my rangefinder camera’s viewing window) I see my grandson about to leap across the gap.  I have already figured I’ll need a 1/1000 second shutter speed to capture the leap with clarity.  I’ve set my camera for the right aperture at that speed.  I start pressing the shutter button as I sense he is going through with it.  Got him!  Right in mid air.   Not so much because I had extraordinary reaction time, but because I planned the whole thing as I saw the event unfolding.

Another example:  In the woods I see a leaning tree, a sinuous path, an inviting composition. All it lacks is a walker, a rivet for the eye.  I focus on the point in the sunshine where I want him to pass, and I wait patiently for a walker to make his way to me through the woods and down the path ahead.  Eventually he arrives, and when he steps into the right spot I gently depress the shutter.

Third example, one that took more than a year of anticipating:  I see how nicely the classical church spire compliments the modern sky scraper.  But my vision for the composition requires a dramatic sky, and just the right light.  I wait for those conditions to arrive, but I have many months to wait.  Then, on a windy Spring morning the sky and the light arrive and I am ready.  Clever to have captured just the right moment?  No– imaginative, and patient.

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In doing some Web research today I stumbled upon a new information storing program called Evernote, which enables you to quickly store text highlights, PDF files, picture files, and whole web pages, and sync these stored bits of information in your own account at the Evernote server, which can be accessed on the Internet from any computer. 

To make all this work you download an Evernote program for your computer from their website.  If you use Firefox or Internet Explorer you can install an Evernote add-on which enables you to select portions of a web page, or entire pages.  Don’t know how Evernote does this, but you can even select and store text bits that are parts of images.  My techie son notes, however, “What I find wacky about Evernote is that you can take pictures of (some) handwriting, and search to locate the words written on that page, but there’s no way to retrieve the text from the note once you’ve found it.  Not nearly as useful as it should be.”

Well, there probably are some improvements to be made, but still, it’s really handy to have a means of storing a broad array of information quickly, and then be able to retrieve the bit you stored a month or two ago by means of a search string (or at least, in most cases).
 
Check out www.evernote.com. 

Promote Your Website!

Once you have created a website, you want people to visit, and keep visiting.  The most important quality of popular websites is fresh and useful information. Weed out notices of transpired events.  Keep the new content coming!  This can be a tedious task over the long haul, which is the reason for a having a Telecom team instead of one Web techie, and being on the lookout for future team members too. 

In addition to maintaining timely and useful information, here are some other inexpensive ways to promote your website:

Study "search engine optimization".  Most Web "surfers" will find their way to you via search engines.  You must learn how to get your website included in the first page of a Google search report, that is, near the top of the Google (or other search engine’s) stack.  If your site doesn’t make the first page, chances are the seeker won’t find it, because he or she won’t take the trouble to look on subsequent pages.

How to get your site ranked near the top of the Google stack?  Here are some techniques that have worked for me:

Choose search terms that few other content providers are likely to have already picked. My photography "handle," TCDavis (just so, with no spaces) was devised by this strategy.  Google "TCDavis" and you will find me at the top of the Google stack, in part because very few other content providers are using that handle.

Throw your line in where the most fish are.  Join large social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, and promote your site by posting information there with links back to your website.

Contact other site maintainers and tell them that you are providing a link at your site to their site, and ask them to reciprocate.  Search engines assign a higher rank to web pages to which many other web pages point (by hyperlinks).

Write a product review for Amazon.com (a HUGE social network, in effect) for a product that has newly been released and therefore hasn’t been reviewed much yet.  Write a detailed review which will be useful to readers seeking information about this new product.  Amazon gives each reviewer a profile space, free.  In your profile space, take advantage of your high visibility:  Promote whatever websites you wish by noting their urls.  Your early review is likely to get lots of "hits," and grateful readers may very well click on those links in your profile.

People love to look at pictures.  If you take good pictures, display them at the photographer’s social network, Flickr.  Once again, take advantage of your visibility there to place links in your photo comments to sites on the web you want your fans to visit.

People love even more to watch videos.  Produce good ones and stream them at YouTube, a hugely popular video site, and in your profile there you will have another platform for promoting the Web links you want them to see (besides your video ones).

Of course, you can also pay a fee to companies which will list your site with various search engines so that it gets included in search indexes.  Make sure to check the effectiveness of such companies.  A good way to check on the honesty and quality of products and services advertized on the Web is to type "review" into a Google search window, followed by whatever you want to investigate.  You will often find reviews by customers who are either very happy or unhappy with the product.  Middle of the roaders don’t usually bother to report. 

Please visit my Web literacy blog and leave questions/comments:  www.CyberKenBlog.com , Rev. Tom Davis